Frank Kane

By : Frank Kane

:: It has taken 10 years — for reasons too complicated to explain here — but I finally made it to Saudi Arabia. After a decade of living and working in the Arabian Gulf, a trip to Jeddah earlier this week to attend the Top CEO Conference at King Abdullah Economic City (KAEC) was interesting and enjoyable, and was simultaneously much less stressful and much less boring than I had been warned.

Here are seven things I learned on my first, but certainly not the last, visit to the Kingdom.

1. Davos can come to the desert. The first Top CEO gig outside the UAE was a glittering success. It owed a lot in inspiration to the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos, Switzerland, if you can imagine such an Alpine phenomenon in the sands of the Hijaz. Mediaquest, the Dubai-based publisher, and French business school Insead, who organized the event and the splendid awards ceremony that went with it, deserve a lot of credit. I am sure it will be back in Saudi Arabia next year.

2. Awards ceremonies do not have to be all fake and fabricated. The Top CEO Awards process was refreshingly objective. Too often in this region and elsewhere, awards owe more to personal favors and relationships than to rational, independent evaluation. But as Julien Hawari, co-CEO of Mediaquest explained eloquently, his “formula” was different. For the third year of these awards, only companies quoted on regional stock markets were assessed, and the rankings were largely based on publicly disclosed information, some Insead-inspired variable factors, and all backed up by an independent audit. So the awards ceremony at KAEC’s Bay La Sun Hotel saw only well-deserved back-slapping, rather than the usual back-scratching.

3. Dubai’s Jebel Ali port could face serious long-term competition. KAEC — the huge project 100 km north of Jeddah run by CEO Fahd Al-Rasheed, and backed by Dubai’s Emaar — aims to set up a new, modern commercial hub on the shores of the Red Sea. The scale is awesome, the ambition awe-inspiring. To industrial, maritime and residential facilities will soon be added leisure and entertainment projects that will enhance the KAEC’s momentum. Some experts think that when it is fully operational, many years hence, it will supplant the Dubai maritime and industrial hub as the main one in the region.

The Top CEO Conference gave an insight into Saudi Arabia’s economic issues, from the benefits of more women in work to the challenges of implementing the Vision 2030 plan.

Frank Kane

1. Some doubts remain about the Saudi transformation. All the panel sessions dealt with important issues, but perhaps the weightiest were the ones about the future of public-private partnerships (PPP) and foreign investment in Saudi Arabia. Overall, the tone was optimistic, with most of the expert panelists agreeing that the alliance between government and the private sector to see through the Vision 2030 strategy was strong, and that the transformation of the Saudi economy would encourage greater foreign investment. There were some reservations, however, regarding corruption, red tape and adjudication, which remain to be addressed.

2. Goldman Sachs is not entirely loved in the Kingdom. While the rest of the financial world is obsessed with the impending initial public offering (IPO) of Saudi Aramco, inside Saudi Arabia it is not the only show in town. The forthcoming flotation was barely mentioned in any of the formal sessions at KAEC. I grabbed one old Saudi hand to try to get his experienced view on it, and he shrugged his shoulders. “I just hope Goldman Sachs isn’t involved in it,” he said.

3. Jeddah needs a new airport. The Red Sea capital is the entrepôt for millions of Haj and Umrah pilgrims on their way to Makkah and Madinah, as well as hundreds of thousands of business travelers every year. The airport is, well, dilapidated. Security is tight and there seems to be plenty of surveillance technology around, but it is a dreary welcome to the west coast of Saudi Arabia. A new one is planned, as one of the fruits of the commitment to PPP, and is set to open soon.

4. Saudi women want and deserve empowerment. There was a big female participation in the conference, and many of the delegates were young, intelligent and articulate women. They were more optimistic compared with their male counterparts, but more impressively they wanted intensely to have a greater role in the future. The opportunity cost of enforced female participation in many parts of the economy was measured in the tens of billions of dollars, and several percentage points of gross domestic product (GDP). In my first experience of seeing Saudi women in action on their own terms, I can only conclude it is a no-brainer.

The visit has given me a real appetite to return to Saudi Arabia and learn more about the biggest and most interesting economy in the Gulf. I will be back before long. Wouldn’t it be nice if I could visit more often, and soak up more of the culture, with a multiple-entry visa?

Frank Kane is an award-winning business journalist based in Dubai. He can be reached on Twitter @frankkanedubai

Disclaimer: Views expressed by writers in the Column section are their own and do not reflect RiyadhVision’s point-of-view.

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