ALKHOBAR, 29 July — At the beginning of July it was announced by Arriyadh Exhibition Company and the Dubai World Trade Center, that GITEX Saudi Arabia would be held April 21-24, 2002 in Riyadh. This move will surely not prove healthy for the Kingdom’s IT environment.
COMDEX Saudi Arabia is already scheduled for April 1-4, 2002 in Jeddah. The show is going into its third year and so it is to be expected that the teething pains common with any new show have been dealt with and that both the organizers and the exhibitors will be better able to focus on the task of promoting the business of IT in the Kingdom. Now we have this recent development and it is not a good one.
Saudi IT companies are in a dither. Not one can afford to do both COMDEX and GITEX. All the costs associated with a stand of good size at either show could add up to SR200,000 or more. In the past companies were hardly able to pay that once in a year, let alone twice and just weeks apart.
Speaking with many Riyadh-based international IT firms, they stated that they were attracted to GITEX because it would be held in Riyadh and so their people wouldn’t have to travel to Jeddah. Also, the headquarters for many large companies that use IT services are based in Riyadh so it will be easier for them to come to a Riyadh show, too. Then there is the situation for the local Saudi IT companies. Plenty of these firms are based in Jeddah and they would continue to support COMDEX. Many businessmen also felt that Jeddah was a more hospitable venue for an IT trade show. Let’s face it. The Kingdom is never going to be able to put on an IT event as internationally popular and accessible as the GITEX show held in Dubai each October.
One very important point that has not been addressed is what will happen to women, in and associated with the Saudi IT industry, if both shows do not survive? At COMDEX Saudi Arabia, businesswomen have been welcomed and it was noted that last year their numbers were greatly increased. There has been no mention of any female participation in the Riyadh show or its related educational seminars by the GITEX officials. The Labor Office has been actively encouraging women to enter the IT field. For women to function effectively in IT they must have access in their homeland to the same business and educational resources as any of their male colleagues.
I am in great despair over the COMDEX vs. GITEX issue and with good cause. This spring in Egypt, COMDEX and GITEX battled it out and GITEX won the first round with the cancellation of the COMDEX event. However, COMDEX Cairo is scheduled to return next year with a new show organization and more creative ideas for the exhibition. Despite GITEX’s “win,” according to the GITEX website only 10,000 trade visitors attended the Cairo show. This is from a country with a population of 60 million.
Looking at both organizations it should be noted that GITEX is scheduled to do only five IT shows in 2002 — Lebanon, Egypt, UAE, India and Saudi Arabia. Four of those shows are in the Middle East.
This does not give the company much international reach. On the other hand, COMDEX has much more experience doing IT shows and does dozens yearly. In 2002, COMDEX events will be organized in countries around the world such as Switzerland, Canada, USA, South Korea, Australia, Brazil and Saudi Arabia among others. And it should be noted that Key3Media, the organizers behind COMDEX, are already in high-level talks to enter the UAE market.
IT is a global business. At this point it is also vital to highlight a few bits of information that will be sensitive to many in this market but they are important, even more so because it appears that these fact have been forgotten. For all the growth in IT evidenced by the Arab Middle East, not one Arab Middle Eastern nation is as yet the same IT powerhouse as another Middle Eastern nation we don’t like to talk about. That country is Israel.
COMDEX holds the premier IT event in Israel. At the last COMDEX Israel show, 30,000 IT professionals turned out. This is in a nation of only six million people. Foreign investment in Israel’s IT sector is booming.
At 11.5 percent CAGR, Israel is the world’s fastest-growing IT market, expected to reach $4.8 billion in 2003, compared to worldwide growth of 9.6 percent. The PC market is expected to grow at CAGR 6.7 percent, packaged software at 7.4 percent, multi-user systems at 9.5 percent and IT services at 14.5 percent.
IT spending in Israel is projected at: 2001=$3.9b, 2002=$4.3b, 2003=$4.7b and 2004=$5b. Currently, Israel boasts 1.3 million PC users. The number of Israeli IT companies listed on the NASDAQ is second only to the number of California IT companies. IT spending for the entire Middle East is anticipated to top $46 billion in 2002 and one small non-Arab nation is going to account for about one-tenth of that total. This Middle East spending figure is based on data from the GITEX site. According to IDC however, Israel represents 25 percent of the IT market for the Middle East & Africa region of the world. In either case, the numbers don’t bode well for the Kingdom, a nation with three times the population of Israel.
It has been repeatedly and urgently stated by some of the biggest names in the Kingdom’s IT business, that Saudi Arabia must have one central organization to provide the overall vision needed to make IT in this country thrive. Because we don’t have such a group we now have COMDEX and GITEX getting ready to do battle here in Spring 2002.
It is certain that there will be no real winner in this contest and the ultimate loser will be this nation’s IT sector. Worldwide, with the spread of the Internet and technologies such as video conferencing, companies are questioning the wisdom of participating in trade shows, especially small, local ones. One company that withdrew from this year’s COMDEX Saudi Arabia stated that they used the budget they would have spent on the show to hold seminars in Riyadh, Alkhobar and Jeddah and they created far more business from that effort then they did from participating in Dubai’s GITEX the previous year. This company is not alone in their sentiments.
In researching today’s column many companies stated to me that they were completely undecided about which show to join — COMDEX or GITEX — and that if it looked as if both shows would be poor due to the struggle between the organizers perhaps they wouldn’t participate in either.
