How Dubai is ready to help the world get back to business

In an exclusive interview with Arabian Business, Hamad Buamim, CEO of Dubai Chamber highlighted the significance of the 12th World Chambers Congress being hosted in Dubai (12WCC), the first time it is being held in the post-Covid-19 era. He also shared his insights on ‘Chambers 4.0’ and the lessons that other cities can learn from Dubai in responding to the pandemic and dealing with disruption. 

Buamim, who also serves as the chair of the ICC-World Chambers Federation, shared his expectations for the 12WCC and prospects for cross-border cooperation during the event. He also elaborated on how Dubai Chamber has restructured to meet the changing needs of Dubai’s maturing business community.

The congress coincides with Expo 2020 Dubai, where one of the main themes is opportunity. How timely is it that, as the UAE welcomes the world to Dubai, Dubai Chamber and the ICC-World Chambers Federation is bringing together more than 1,000 chamber leaders and members from more than 100 countries for the 12WCC?

I believe this is very timely. The whole world has gone through a lot of challenges in the past 18 months and one of the things that happened was that we had limited face-to-face interactions.

We hope through events like the World Chambers Congress and of course the whole of Expo, we’re giving the world a global platform to showcase their innovative solutions, to be able to reactivate the business activities. It’s great for businesses, for government leaders, it’s great for companies to have these opportunities to interact.

When it comes to the Chambers of Commerce, it’s been quite a long while that we didn’t really interact and, also, right now, I believe the agenda is very important on what we need to connect and talk about. It’s very timely and very important and we hope that we’ll be able to get a lot of these opportunities really discussed for the way forward.

You talk about reactivating business. Dubai and the UAE has really led the world in reopening their economies, what learnings from that can help the global business community as it builds back from the Covid 19 pandemic?

There is no doubt that the past couple of years have been very challenging for the whole world and we know different countries took different measures. I’m very proud that the UAE and Dubai took certain measures that were able to put us where we are today, which is extremely positive compared to the rest of the world.

I believe that the country, first of all, with the leadership, we were able to deal with the health issues in the right way in terms of businesses. The central bank and the government measures came also quite quickly, to allow the minimum disruption to happen and to allow the continuity of businesses to continue.

Add to that the really great technology infrastructure that exists in this country and the penetration of the internet; this allowed everything to go very smoothly, whether that was working from distance or e-learning, or e-commerce.

When we went into the virtual world, we were able to do that quickly and then all the protective health measures were put in place in a very orderly way.

The government did its part. I believe businesses also did their part, and the people were able to respond in a good way – we saw all these things in terms of the vaccination, etc.

One thing Dubai did quite different than the rest of the world was by allowing that balance of safety from one side, but also allowing life and businesses to keep going and to continue.

The government implemented a number of reforms that allowed people to work, even to come, live in Dubai and work from distance. The long-term visas and 100 percent company ownership for foreigners also boosted a lot of business activities.

There were a lot of quick changes that were delivered, whether by the city or the country, that really allowed the balance between openness and restrictions and we see this model as something the rest of the world should learn from, because where we stand today is way better than many even developed countries.

Turning to the congress itself, what will be at the top of the agenda for you? And equally, where do you see the key areas for cooperation and collaboration? I guess, what are the most pressing issues that need to be addressed?

Funny enough, when we bid for this event, three or four years ago, we identified technology to be our theme. Of course, we also wanted always to align this event with the big theme of Expo, ‘Connecting minds, creating the future’, around their areas of big changes, whether it is about sustainability, mobility, or opportunity.

Now, of course, in the last couple of years, this area of technology has started to have even more interest. So, our congress will have more attention, in terms of the digital transformation and the future of Chambers of Commerce, to be able to serve the businesses.

A lot of changes have had to happen and business’s needs nowadays are way more than what they used to be historically. And one thing that we will address is how chambers have evolved during the past 24 months to be able to stay relevant to their members.

Again, different countries went through different challenges, different sectors were affected differently, and we believe there are a lot of innovative solutions that have come from different organisations.

We hope this event will be a great opportunity for those who really had some successful stories, to be able to share them with the rest of the Chambers of Commerce during this congress

Has the past 18 months or so made an event like the congress even more important?

The world was disconnected during the past 18 months and this will be the first event since the pandemic for Chambers of Commerce to connect face-to-face and have direct interaction. We hope this will also make the event more special.

You touched on it earlier about the partnership between the public and private sector, and even members of the public. Are you hoping to bring that message to the Word Chambers, that what the UAE has achieved through those collaborations, is an idea of how the world can work together to increase opportunity.

Public private partnership is always important for almost all the chambers across the world. Chambers always represent businesses and they always have these good, strong channels with governments to establish that public private dialogue.

One thing that we are keen to do during this gathering of global Chambers of Commerce around the world is really to emphasise the public private partnership from the global conversation point of view and we want to address the issues of great interest for businesses throughout the world.

We are very eager to discuss issues related to climate change, issues related to vaccinations in some of the least developed countries, and issues related to restrictions, or protectionism, or supply chains, that’s really impacting businesses across the world.

The International Chamber of Commerce is the largest representation of businesses in the whole world, representing more than 40 million small and medium businesses.

This will be our opportunity to send the world and the G20 a message of what we hope for. We hope for a world that can get out of this pandemic, not as pockets and limited countries, but we want this to go across the world. We hope for more effective globalisation measures. We need to get away from protectionism and we want the world to be good and great for everyone.

Take me back to four years ago-plus, why was it important for Dubai to host this and how many countries do you have coming? And where do you see the potential for key alliances to be made?

One thing that has always been important for us, that when we host Expo 2020 Dubai, we have a lot of elements that support our big event. Part of that of course is bringing all these global events that can happen during this six months and this was our bid to the rest of the chamber community that we can bring it to Dubai to meet among our Chambers of Commerce, but also we can bring it to Dubai to connect with the rest of the world that we are hosting in Dubai, to connect with the rest of 190-plus countries and see what they are offering

We are looking at more than 1,000 people participating from more than 100 countries. We understand there are limitations in some countries because of the travel restrictions, and with that, for the first time, this event will have the hybrid mode, where those who will not have the ability to attend, will be able to use the virtual way to continue to be a part of it.

It’s one of the unique aspects we are putting on. And this is where I said it’s funny, four years ago, we thought of this and it’s started to become much more relevant.

Nowadays, we are talking about the future of Chambers of Commerce. The slogan, or the theme, of this event is ‘Chamber 4.0’ – it’s the future of Chambers. With this, we want all the delegates to go through three years’ experience, and take from that a tool that they can go back to their own organisation and test some of these new frameworks we will identify.

We’ll be revealing a new framework called Chamber Model Innovation. This is something we came up with during the past year and this will show how the Chambers of Commerce can get ideas into businesses and take ideas, identify a framework to test them, to gather data and hopefully be able to execute them.

We realise that in the future not all chambers will be the same, but we hope that we can provide them with a tool of how they can evolve their business models to be able to serve their members in the best possible way.

This is a tool we will initiate, we will teach everyone about who will be part of this event. It will be a journey. It will start in Dubai, it will take a year-and-a-half till we meet next time in Geneva, and we hope by that time it will reveal if this is a good model or not.

This is something we believe we want to provide to our delegates, it’s beyond just the three days, it’s really a journey into the future, and a journey to evolve and innovate the business model and bring this innovative thinking in the way they operate.

In your role as chairman of the Federation, how important is it to you for this to be a congress of knowledge-sharing, to help global business leaders rise up from the challenges of Covid?

We believe Covid was the biggest crisis that we went through during the past couple of years, but it’s also the biggest opportunity that certain organisations benefited from or can benefit from.

In terms of the Congress, we see learning as one of the most important aspects and sharing knowledge will definitely bring a lot to the table. We will definitely be collaborating and cooperating, showing the good things that were done during the past two years from thousands of organisations in different parts of the world.

We hope also to share some unsuccessful stories, which others can also learn from.

The area of sharing knowledge is something really very big in the agenda of this Congress. Covid is a big part of that, because Covid accelerated a lot of problems and really accelerated a lot of solutions. How you achieve the right balance, where I believe many organisations, if they learn the right thing, or do the right things, definitely this is a big opening for them.

Finally, tell me about Dubai Chamber. There’s a restructuring currently going on. How key is that for the future of start-ups, SMEs and smart transformation in general in the emirate here?

If you live in Dubai, one thing you need to believe in, is that the only constant thing is change. Change is always there and one thing I believe the leadership and the government realise is that many things keep changing, particularly during the past few months, and for the way forward, certain elements need to be included in the Chamber.

Historically, the Chamber always represented the traditional sectors, and the smaller medium businesses. We believe that we did that quite well and this is what we label going forward as the ‘traditional Chamber’. This is something that we want to continue doing, and we’ve been empowered by the government to do it even more.

However, there are two areas we didn’t really cover historically enough and these are the areas of digital economy, which is really evolving quite fast and is an area of big growth that needs to be addressed; and the other one is the multinational.

International companies, we always looked at them as big players that don’t need to be represented. But now, Dubai being the city that we are, we believe that they need to be represented, they need to have certain policies in order to serve them better.

We will continue, of course, doing what we’ve been doing for the traditional sectors, and the smaller medium businesses, and for the big boys, the international multinationals, we want also to represent them and to work with them, to play a new role that we didn’t play before, which is attracting talent to Dubai and attracting also more big multinational companies.

The city really assigned the Chamber a bigger role with this restructuring, however, to be able to serve the government and to serve these different sectors that we didn’t serve before, we had to restructure. Of course, everything will be done under one umbrella, it will continue to be Dubai Chamber, however, we’ll have Dubai Chamber of Commerce, representing the traditional sectors; Dubai Chamber of Digital Economy, representing the start-ups and venture capitalists and all the new interesting sectors; and Dubai International Chamber to represent the multinational.

It’s only the beginning. It’s something that we are experimenting with. We hope our experiment will be successful, but the only way to learn is to start this journey.