DUBAI, 17 June 2003 — A Middle Eastern company selling corporate information to the West is unheard of, and that’s one of the things that makes AQB Zawya stand out from the crowd. Headed by Managing Director, Ihsan Jawad and based in Dubai, ABQ Zawya has come a long way in a short time.
“Back in 1999, I was doing investment banking in London,” said Jawad. “We were working on a few Middle East deals, some of them quite large. I noticed that although we had the best information services available to us, when it came to the Middle East, such international services as Bloomberg and Reuters didn’t do this region any justice. Even though we paid top dollars for these information services there really wasn’t enough coverage of Middle Eastern business.”
Jawad continued: “I actually suffered personally from this problem because working on one deal after another, every time I worked on a deal I’d have to struggle and start gathering information all over again and building my case. So I thought there must be a good reason for a company to exist just to take care of this work full-time. We were lucky in that the Internet came along to provide a huge distribution mechanism. Then there was the Internet bubble because it helped us with financing at the very beginning.”
In January 2000, Jawad stepped away from his career in investment banking and with a few partners set up a company in London -- Zawya.com. Within a week after the company was founded, they had $1 million in funding.
Zawya.com opened its offices in March and its online information service went live in October 2000. From the start Jawad knew that Zawya.com’s goal was to serve an English speaking, highly educated global audience that was interested in business and finance issues in the MENA region — the Arab countries specifically.
Initially, there were difficulties. In a year, Zawya.com burned through that first million in funding. When Jawad went out looking for more money in 2001, the market wasn’t very receptive due to the demise of so many Internet companies. At that time, Zawya.com was approached by a private Gulf-based equity group, ABQ Investments, which eventually became their backers. One of the things ABQ Investments suggested to increase profitability was to come back to the Middle East. So ABQ Zawya packed up, moved to Dubai and got down to business.
As an information service, it might be thought that the staff at Zawya’s offices in Dubai would be responsible for writing all the content at Zawya.com. But that’s not how the information at the site is created.
“We are not reporters. We are not researchers. We are business people,” explained Jawad. “So the model we adopted was not to write the information ourselves, but to collate it from other sources. If you look hard, business and economic information about the Middle East is out there. The problem is in delivering it. Our content aggregation is unique in the Middle East. We source, combine and clean the content from about 130 publications furnishing us with information. Of course Arab News is one publication in our information portfolio.
This creates a type of hybrid online magazine — Zawya.com — a live information scoop that makes available critical regional business intelligence on a daily basis. Currently we are taking information only from English sources because the harvesting of our information is done with clever technology that selects the news items and categorizes them. Putting in the graphics, choosing which stories to highlight and selecting related companies and content is done manually by our editors.”
Jawad estimated that there was a potential audience of one quarter to one half million people around the world who would be interested in the specific business information that Zawya could provide. From the beginning, he set out to target them, attract their attention on a daily basis and sell them information.
In addition to providing people with news, Zawya wanted to make available to its subscribers company information, as well. Jawad had looked around for sources of information about Middle Eastern companies, but he didn’t find any good, comprehensive ones. So Jawad decided to create a company database, called Corporate Monitor, which today covers about 9,000 of the biggest firms in the Arab World.
“Through Corporate Monitor, we give our subscribers first hand intelligence about companies,” said Jawad. “Our focus is on the Arab companies, not the multinationals doing business in the area. We tell where the company is based. Its ownership. Organization structure. What the company does.
Then there’s a profile about the company. There might be other information too, such as the name of the firm’s lawyers, auditors and bankers. There also might be applicable news about the company. It depends on what we can find. I must admit that Saudi companies are the most difficult to get information about. We aim to review the information on each company at least annually and possibly more often if something extremely significant happens to that firm. For public companies, Corporate Monitor shows how the stock has performed over the past year.”
To become a part of Corporate Monitor a company must have at least 50 employees, paid up capital of at least $5 million or revenues of $10 million or more. Zawya has a team of researchers who are in contact with businesses in the region on a daily basis in order to update the Corporate Monitor database. These researchers also follow every business trend and add new companies to the database daily.
“We get the corporate information from the companies, themselves and we use other sources, too,” Jawad explained. “There is a certain amount of trust involved. For the ABQ Zawya subscription price of $1,600 annually we can’t afford to send out private investigators to perform background checks on each business. However, we do provide really good intelligence and we do our best not to mislead our subscribers. In addition to the company information, Corporate Monitor subscribers have full access to the archive in our News Center.”
Currently, due to the global economic conditions and the significant happenings in this region, there is considerable interest in Zawya.com from Europe and the US. Jawad believes that this is because the information received through Zawya’s News Center and Corporate Monitor provides a stepping stone into the Who’s Who of the Middle East.
“Companies that want to work with local partners and target new clients are very interested in such information,” commented Jawad.
“The US Treasury Department has taken a major subscription to the Corporate Monitor. Really, since February, interest from Europe and the US has been booming. There is so much interest that we are considering having a dedicated salesperson for the US market. US companies have a history of buying information because they understand the value of business intelligence. In the area of information services, we are proud to be bucking the trend and producing a service, which is being consumed by the west. We are the first Middle East subscription-based information service that has been shown to be viable.”
And Jawad feels that the future is bright for ABQ Zawya.
“Now, we are financially strong enough to grow the business,” he asserted. “We landed in Dubai with seven employees. We now have sixteen, plus three outside our Dubai office. We were at break even back in December, but we decided to quickly expand. If you say I’m happy with what I have now, you’ll be walked over in six months time. We’re encouraged by our revenue, which is going up. We are most concerned right now with establishing a strong brand and a robust revenue stream.”
In conclusion, Jawad feels that there is a major and growing market for the services being offered through Zawya.com.
“We now have hundreds of subscribers in the region, but the market potential is thousands. We are currently rolling out proper sales offices in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Egypt, and so on. We have created something good and unique. Zawya.com is not like any other website out there. It offers premium, intelligent information and we believe that’s something that the market needs and wants.”