imported 2024-03-17 17:43:07
Commercial Bank was established in 1960. That’s about 50 years of existence. It opened in this area, the commercial area. Most of the branches were also built in the commercial area, rather than in residential areas. This was corrected later on when the management of the bank realised it was necessary to have a presence in the residential areas. There will be further expansion itno the residential areas of new cities that are coming up.
Actually it’s a very crucial time for all the oil exporting countries, but mainly for my country Kuwait. As you quite rightly said, I was talking about the subject even when I was the Minister of Finance in 2006/2007. I was worrying about the point at which the oil prices would drop. A drop which is out of our hands and that’s what is happening now. Gentlemen, last night I was even checking with the Minister of Oil of Kuwait and I was also checking with one of our oil experts about the price of our oil at close of day on Friday. It is 54. 54, six months ago it was 100. So what does that mean for our budget?
We are attracting bigger companies in the health sector which we can add to our portfolios so we can expand in the medical, laboratory and pharmaceutical industries as well. We have other branches in Baghdad, Iraq and Erbil where we are operating and we are hosting some agencies and attracting more businesses.
This increased to about 650,000 by the end of 2013. Midway through 2014, we received our 8 millionth visitor.
The retail market of Kuwait is really growing up right now. It has seen good growth and especially over the last 5 years we have seen tremendous changes. One of the biggest malls here is called The Avenues and has about 300 outlets.
The sector is growing. I like to divide the construction sector into 5 branches. The first is civil construction which is large and mega buildings. In this country there are a lot of existing projects for all of the Ministries. These will be new constructions for the governmental bodies. We are now working on three mega projects for governmental buildings. Also there are housing projects which include about 50 thousand houses for Kuwaitis. These projects will be worth about 130 billion US dollars.
We are also one of the largest asset managers in the region; we manage over 3.5 billion KDs worth of assets under management (AUM).
Kuwait is an oil related economy, with the energy sector dominating the economy. Oil and oil related products constitute about 55 to 60% of Kuwait’s GDP. A sharp drop in oil prices, like a 40% drop, is going to affect the economy. The nominal GDP will get affected. Real GDP will depend on how OPEC reacts about 6 months down the line.
We need to increase the numbers by 15 to 20% every year to reach the target we have set ourselves, of $20 billion. We plan to have strong advertising campaigns all the way through to 2020. We will try to attract new segments of tourists to visit Egypt by offering safaris, spas, golf and MICE.
We have a mega project: the Damietta project, a grain logistics hub. It is related to the poor Egyptian who buys a loaf of bread from a village in Delta or Upper Egypt. In order to guarantee the stability of what we are doing, we have to invest for the future.
