Among many exhibitors at GITEX this year, one major point was very clear: The Middle East is manifesting itself as a major market for international companies.

Arab News spoke to Ericsson’s vice-president for the GCC, Victoria Strand, who said that her company has been away from Gitex for some years, but came back this year because of many reasons, among them the importance of the region.

“In our strategy for 2020 we laid down the core business of work. We see what goes on in the world and believe it is relevant to our operation. Through our services we provide solutions in different fields, and function as operator for the transport field to governments, ministries, etc.,” Strand added.

“The GCC countries are small but rich, with great potential lying in their youth,” she explained. Ericsson, a Swedish operator, has been changing and developing its vision, which leads to optimizing its strategy.

“We have developed a series of products, which you can see presented here, under the theme — home living/home life. Our products vary from inside the house — like the item on the wall that can give information on weather conditions for emergency cases for example — to those that can be used by governments, or the Volvo car that can tell you about traffic conditions, or alternative transport possibilities.”

Ericsson’s 5 divisions for the region, Saudi Arabia is one of its own, proves that this market requires and demands more attention, and the “potential of consuming the Saudi market has.”

Ericsson is a long-standing one in the region - since 1878 in Ethiopia, 50 years Pakistan, 35 years Bahrain — but takes into consideration the nature of each market. “In Pakistan, they just started with 3G and we have made announcement with a local provider for optimizing their Internet services.”

Another company, Mobogenie, also stated the importance of the Saudi market to its business. Despite Dubai being the location where they have offices, Saudi Arabia — followed by Egypt — is the biggest market in the region.

Mobogenie can be seen as the lower-budget version of Google. It has the CYMaker — the new app development platform. “When we first started to develop our products, we were faced with uncooperative behavior from the Google team, which led us to the idea to develop the same idea but at lower costs.” Saudi Arabia is important because the consuming traffic in the Internet is huge.

Mobogenie — a Chinese developer for applications for the Android platform — empowers anyone to contribute to the creation of a smart city environment through the creation of customized apps. CYMaker — the new app development platform by Mobogenie — will streamline the app process, making it step-by-step simple to the app world.

“In addition to our initial idea, we provide a complete circle service to our customers, whether with or without app we help,” Rahul Srivastava, senior marketing and operations director at Mobogenie, told Arab News.

The challenge of language was the reason for the company to move to Dubai. The Middle East’s app market is continuously growing with smartphone penetration in the region among the high-test in the world, currently at 62 percent.

“My team that you see here is a young and dynamic team that gives the app the correct description. The Arab market is a neglected one for long and we could see the traffic rising tremendously when we added the Arabic one.”

Advertisement is the only hassle customers have to deal with when using Mobogenie as their platform. “This is one source of income we have,” Srivastava said.