For the first time I attended the Gulf Information and Technology Exhibition (Gitex) — an event held every year in Dubai. It was impressive all round, especially in light of the financial returns. Over 82,000 people turned up for the opening day. Visitors paid SR20 for one day or SR50 for the full run, and this generated millions.
The benefits for Dubai itself were enormous. Assuming that 25 percent of the visitors came from outside the UAE and that each spent SR2,000 during their stay, the city netted SR40 million. Hotels were fully booked; no seats were available on flights into Dubai, and once there you were lucky to find a taxi in streets jammed with traffic.
It is obvious that a large number of visitors were Saudis, probably 15 percent. Many contracts and other business deals included Saudis. Had the exhibition, for which the Saudi market is a major target, been held in Riyadh or Jeddah, the rewards for local businesses, airlines, hotels, transport and other services would have been enormous. Tens of thousands of people would have flocked to the show and thousands of jobs would have been available, including temporary employment for students and other young people who desperately need work.
We need to enhance our knowledge of IT to cope with a rapidly developing industry. India is a good example; President A.P.J. Abdul Kalam boasted of his country’s potential as a major market for info-based products, to be worth $80 billion by 2008. With proper planning the figure could rise to $150 billion by 2010. Seventy-five percent of our secondary school graduates can enroll in computer colleges, but only four percent are actually admitted, with the rest left to look for work as salesmen or heavy truck drivers.
I wish our local exhibition firms would seriously consider staging IT exhibitions in our major cities instead of focusing on consumer products. The Kingdom has a huge market potential for such events. It is unfortunate that while Dubai, Manama and other places in the Gulf take the lead in focusing on new innovations, products and processes that provide solutions to complicated problems, we continue to lag behind.
