Likening regional competition to a playground, panellists at Hypermotion Lab in Expo 2020 said the UAE and Dubai are in a league of their own and are only competing against themselves.
As the UAE celebrates its 50th anniversary this December, high-ranking Dubai officials reflected on the emirate’s ability to weather through the toughest challenges – including coronavirus – and come out on top.
“If you look at Dubai, just 50 years ago it was a desert and now you see it fully transformed. Every time Dubai and the UAE feel the playground is full of players, we create a new league for ourselves,” said Mohamed Shael Alsaadi, CEO Corporate Strategic Affairs Sector, Dubai Economy.
“Let the competition play on the playground that we have set – everyone has the right to play in the league and have their own strategy to be number one. Now we’ve left that league to go into another one and create another playground for everybody to come and compete,” he continued.
His comments follow a directive announced earlier this year by Saudi Arabia, which stipulated that from 2024, companies who failed to have their regional HQ in Riyadh would not be considered for government contracts.
Since then, a total of 44 multinational companies have agreed to move their regional headquarters to the Saudi capital as it seeks to compete with the likes of Dubai, it was announced at the recent Future Investment Initiative conference.
In line with the playground analogy, and speaking from the perspective of the corporate sector, CEO of Chalhoub Group, Patrick Chalhoub (below), said that businesses need to choose their company headquarters according to their goals and whether they aspire to be local or regional players.
“We have to look forward and see where we want to play. If I want to play in a specific country only, I will probably base my resources there and develop it; if we want to have a bigger playground, then we have to see where to play in order to have this bigger playground,” said Chalhoub.
“This leads me to consider other elements such as infrastructure, meaning where I can be the most connected, where I can travel easily, where I can have the possibility of attracting and developing talent etc.,” he added.
Panelists agreed that Dubai was always ahead of the competition, with Issam Kazim (below), CEO Dubai Tourism saying: “Dubai is in competition within themselves and this has always been the case.
“There has always been competition but we don’t bog ourselves down by watching what is happening next to us, we look ahead and above, and keep pushing forward and forward.”
Abdulla Bin Damithan, DP World UAE region, added: “When people are thinking of regional operating headquarters, we are thinking of global headquarters. Our competition is way far from our region, we are thinking global – we keep evolving and investing.”
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