imported 2024-03-17 17:43:07
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.
Egypt is the world’s largest importer of wheat, at around 10 million tons per year. Unfortunately, due to the lack of sufficient or proper storage conservative numbers by the government estimate around 30% of crops are wasted. Blumberg Grain has a solution.
Malaysia is a very important hub in Asia Pacific. We do a lot of regional conferences and so we have business coming from Singapore and from the major countries within Asia Pacific. We do get quite a lot of business out of China, Australia, Indonesia and Thailand. There is also a lot of international travel and I think that is where Malaysia has been very successful in putting itself on the map for business meetings, events and MICE tourism.
The term we use is “Beit Binzagr” as opposed to Binzagr Group. “Beit Binzagr” is a house, in Jeddah that means a trading house. A number of other merchant families would also refer to themselves as “Beits”.
Asia Aerospace City (AAC) aims to make Malaysia the hub for Aerospace OEMs in South East Asia and beyond. It leverages on various engagement strategies with the Aerospace OEMs across the globe. MARA initiated this idea more than a year ago. MARA is a strategic government organisation that champions capability building for the nation through its activities in education, entrepreneur development and investments. MARA produces approx.30% of the overall Malaysian human capital. There is an expanding need for a more diversified supply chain, sustainable human capital and business growth opportunity in Asia by the OEMs.
