World Cup soccer, F1 racing bring tourism fortune to Gulf states
Marquee events such as the 2022 FIFA World Cup in Qatar and Abu Dhabi’s F1 Grand Prix have helped establish Gulf countries as major-league hosts of global tournaments.
Now they stand to capture a significant share of the global sports tourism market, which is predicted to reach $2 trillion by 2030, according to a Middle East report published by PwC.
Gulf countries have an opportunity to convert their hosting success into a long-term driver of economic growth by building experience-led destinations, immersive fan journeys and a connected regional ecosystem that keeps fans returning throughout the year, the report found.
Sports tourism accounts for about 10% of global tourism spend, but the Gulf region currently only captures about 5-7% of that, leaving room for growth.
Saudi Arabia’s massive investment in sports, largely orchestrated through the Public Investment Fund, is paying off, with the kingdom’s sports market expected to triple to $22.4 billion by 2030, adding $13.3 billion to its GDP.
Novartis seeks to close gap with U.S. in Gulf drug approvals
Novartis, Europe’s second-largest drugmaker, is seeking to obtain broader rights from regulators to sell its newest medicines in the UAE and neighboring Gulf countries as soon as they are approved in the U.S.
Mohamed Ezz Eldin, a 25-year Novartis veteran who runs operations in the Gulf, said the Swiss company is also tapping into genetic data with partners from the region to develop new treatments for rare diseases and illnesses prevalent in the Middle East.
“Our key focus is ensuring that patients eligible for our medicines have access,” Ezz Eldin said in an interview with The Circuit. The Novartis executive, who is based in Dubai, signed a research partnership agreement this week with the Emirates Dermatology Association.
Among the company’s priority activities in the Gulf are development of advanced digital health technologies, AI-based diagnostics and nuclear medicine treatments for cancer, Ezz Eldin said.
The company is also working with the Emirati Genome Program, which analyzes genetic data collected from donors to conduct research with government health authorities and other pharmaceutical firms. Novartis is also supporting the Abu Dhabi Investment Office’s Health, Endurance Longevity and Medicine cluster, known as HELM, in which the Mubadala sovereign wealth fund is a strategic partner.
The UAE, which aspires to become a regional center for biotech development, expects the genome program to yield insights into disease onset and progression, the impact on high-risk populations, and possible new treatments.
The interview has been edited for length and clarity.
What are your priorities for growth in the Gulf?
Our key focus is ensuring that patients eligible for our medicines have access. We partner with authorities and societies to expand access to innovative medicines. We aim to ensure that every eligible patient can access our therapies and adhere to treatment. Access, bringing innovation to the UAE and the GCC, and patient education are core to what we do. In the UAE, patients have almost simultaneous access to medicines after FDA approval. Through partnerships with authorities, we ensure patient and disease awareness to support access.
What areas of research is Novartis engaged with in the region?
AI applied to research is one. One of our most important key performance indicators is how fast our innovative medicines and advanced therapies are available in the UAE. Recently, the UAE was the second or third globally to register and make available several of our medicines, such as cell and gene therapies. Advanced therapies like radioligand therapy for prostate cancer were available in the UAE almost simultaneously with the U.S. and Europe. Speed of registration, availability, reimbursement, and patient access are critical KPIs for us.
You’ve spoken about the importance of regional partnerships. Which organizations is Novartis working with?
Our partnerships extend across a broad spectrum. We are proud to partner with authorities across the Emirates in areas like disease awareness and patient support programs. We have a partnership with the Emirates Dermatology Society focused on disease awareness, education, and degeneration. We also partnered with the Department of Health in Abu Dhabi on drug establishment.
Across different therapy areas, we focus on access to innovation, patient support programs, disease awareness, and other activities. We recently expanded our clinical research activities here. We are proud to have evidence generation, real-world evidence studies, and clinical trials. We also partnered with the DOH on the genomic project they are running.
What does Novartis’ genetic research in the Gulf entail?
We are in a collaborative phase with the Department of Health and other global pharma companies to identify research questions that we can solve together. Initially, we are assessing the linkage between genomic profiling, electronic medical records, and biobank data. After this phase, we aim to launch individual research projects to understand disease onset, high-risk populations, and disease progression, with the goal of prevention and individualized treatment.
Gulf states find Trump tariff impact comparatively light
The threat of a global trade war set off by U.S. President Donald Trump’s sweeping imposition of import tariffs is leaving Gulf countries on the sidelines.
At the lowest end of the levies that Trump announced on Wednesday are Saudi Arabia, the UAE and other GCC states, which will pay 10% tariffs on goods shipped to the U.S. – similar to what is imposed on American goods in the region.
“That means they do it to us and we do it to them,” Trump said at a White House ceremony announcing the tariffs. “Very simple.”
Other countries in the MENA region that were hit with reciprocal tariffs were Egypt and Morocco at 10%, Israel at 17%, Jordan at 20% and Tunisia at 28%.
Global financial markets were hit by a broad selloff after Trump’s announcement, with U.S. equity futures slumping as much as 4%, Bloomberg reports.
Oil prices fell by as much as 3% on worries that trade tensions could curtail economic growth and limit fuel demand.
Etihad could become first Gulf carrier to go public
Competition is picking up in the Middle East aviation market as Gulf countries seek more ways to extract value from diversifying their economies.
In the UAE, Abu Dhabi-based Etihad, backed by the ADQ sovereign wealth fund, is considering an IPO, which would make it the first Gulf carrier to go public, Bloomberg reports.
In Saudi Arabia, which is launching Riyadh Air as a second flag carrier, budget airline Flynas said in December that it is looking into a public share sale.
An accidental grocer has valuable lessons for doing business in the UAE
Jones the Grocer is a UAE institution. Favored by the President, Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed, it has served breakfast, lunch and dinner to a cast of famous faces, including Hilary Clinton and Tony Blair.
With locations now scattered around Abu Dhabi, Dubai, Riyadh and Doha, it began as a rare spot in Abu Dhabi that felt like a neighborhood café. Much of the food and beverage industry in the Gulf is dominated by fast-casual franchises in large shopping malls and high-concept restaurants inside five-star hotels.
The Jones café-markets are, by contrast, airy, with blue-and-white tile and a pronounced lack of trendiness: upmarket but not designed for Instagram. The menu is comfort food-focused: grilled steaks, heaping sandwiches, hearty soups. Large open shelves display gourmet foodstuffs for sale like olive oils, jarred chutneys and marmalades and dark chocolate line the walls. Its charcuterie boards are the mark of a good dinner party in Abu Dhabi; their Thanksgiving turkeys are a favorite of American expats, while the Aussies and Brits lean on Jones to outsource their Christmas roasts.
With revenue of over $50 million across all stores, it’s one of the UAE’s local success stories that is about to go global.
Karachi-born Yunib Siddiqui tells the origin story. Flying from Vietnam on business in 2007, he spotted a double-page spread in the design magazine Wallpaper about an Australian restaurant chain with a produce shop and cheese room called Jones the Grocer.
“The last line ended with the owner saying, oh, he’s interested in growing the brand around the world. I faxed all the locations at the time, trying to get hold of him and he just wrote back to me saying, ‘Come and meet me in Singapore.’”
So he did. And despite not having any prior experience in the restaurant industry, Siddiqui liked what he saw at the Jones in Singapore and signed on the dotted line to open a franchise.
On his way back to London, Siddiqui stopped over in Dubai, and though he’d agreed to open in the U.K. capital, two friends convinced him to do business in the UAE instead, promising to invest.
When he told his wife, she wasn’t keen on moving to the UAE, threatening “instant divorce,” he laughs.
Now, 14 years on from when Siddiqui opened his first outlet, Jones the Grocer has 31 stores across the Middle East, with eight more in the pipeline. In 2019 Siddiqui acquired the global rights to the brand from Louis Vuitton’s private equity arm, L Capital, which in 2015 bought a majority stake in what was then a distressed company. Today, nine of the UAE stores are company-owned and operated. The rest are franchises.
While he decided not to option the outlets in Australia and Singapore, and “ended up with a business that was predominantly in the Middle East,” 54-year-old Siddiqui has plans for global expansion.
“We are opening at London Heathrow,” he said. “We’re opening two sites in Singapore, shortly. We’re already in India. You know, we have ambition to grow beyond the region.”
Jones the Grocer directly employs 195 people, with the franchise stores collectively employing 450 people.
While the Gulf is often seen by outside investors as a potential goldmine, full of residents with discretionary income, Siddiqui says there are steep challenges.
“I think one thing is clear that the cost of doing business here, whether it’s asset prices, rent, whether it’s labor, whether it’s raw materials, it is expensive,” he said “And you know, it’s up there with most other countries.
It doesn’t help that the Middle East is often linked with crisis – most recently with the war in Gaza that has sparked travel advisories.
“People have preconceived impressions, people think that we’re right next to Gaza, probably, but the truth of the matter is that you can’t really change preconceptions,” he said.
Siddiqui warns investors looking at the region not to lump the Gulf countries together, saying that even within countries there are different rules and regulations.
“Abu Dhabi has its own nuances. Dubai has its own regimens, quite different.
“And then if you’re looking at the Gulf …Saudi is a tough, competitive market now. And a lot of people are just going in thinking it’s easy money. Probably it is easy money, but I think it’s very, very hard to get started.”
But when you crack the market, there are some definite advantages.
Now trading in the UAE for close to 14 years, Jones the Grocer has been frequented since the early days by the country’s 62-year-old ruler, who continues to host meetings over breakfast with world players such as Clinton and Blair.
Sheikh Mohammed “was always a big fan,” Siddiqui says “He started coming in within the first two or three weeks of us opening, and he still comes fairly regularly. And then he brought everybody else along.”
Tzipi Livni opens up about her Gulf visits before the Abraham Accords
Long before “Hatikvah,” Israel’s national anthem, played openly in Abu Dhabi or Manama, long before Israeli military jets took part in training exercises with Gulf countries, and long before normalization agreements were signed at the White House, there was one Israeli leader engaging in quiet, and very secret, diplomacy with the Arab world: Tzipi Livni.
Livni, 63, who served in a variety of Israeli government positions, including deputy prime minister, foreign minister and justice minister, between 2001 and 2014, also led the country through several rounds of peace negotiations with the Palestinians. It was this role – where she worked opposite the Palestinian Authority’s chief negotiator, the late Saeb Erekat – that led her to forge warm ties with multiple Arab leaders, some of whom are now at the forefront of the Abraham Accords, the U.S.-mediated normalization agreements between Israel and four Arab countries.
In a recent interview with Jewish Insider, the former Israeli lawmaker downplayed more than a decade of covert meetings and conversations with country leaders, foreign ministers and other representatives of the Emirates, Bahrain, Qatar, even Saudi Arabia. And while former President Donald Trump’s son-in-law and senior advisor Jared Kushner has twice been nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize as one of the architects of the Abraham Accords, it is possible that this entire process might not have happened if not for the groundwork laid by Livni.
“Truthfully, I didn’t think that Kushner could do this; it’s really a huge achievement. I mean, to have these agreements without the Palestinians, it really surprised me when I saw the news. It is a real game-changer,” Livni said during the interview at her Tel Aviv home. “[Kushner] deserves all the credit he is getting.”
Today, relations between Israel and the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Morocco are out in the open, even flourishing. Just this week, Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett made history as the first Israeli premier to travel to the Gulf state of Bahrain. In January, Israeli President Isaac Herzog proudly met with Abu Dhabi’s Crown Prince Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed, following similar visits by Bennett and Foreign Minister Yair Lapid to the United Arab Emirates.
Livni said that she was as surprised as anyone when the White House announced the agreements in August 2020, although, she noted, there were some signs of a regional sea change. She recalled two key incidents several months before that momentous announcement, and the subsequent signing of the Accords on the White House lawn in September 2020, that made her realize attitudes were shifting.
“In 2019, not long after I quit politics, I was invited to attend a conference in Bahrain,” Livni said. “It was an international conference, but the event was sponsored by Bahraini officials, and I arrived there openly with an Israeli passport.”
“For the first time ever, I held a public meeting with [Bahrain’s Foreign Minister Khalid bin Ahmed] Al Khalifa, and we even took a photo together,” she continued. “It felt very normal and that was something I was not used to.”
Livni stepped back from the Israeli political scene three years ago, heading shortly after to teach a course in diplomacy at the Harvard Kennedy School in Cambridge, Mass. It was there, at the tail end of 2019, that she once again noticed a shift in attitudes toward Israel in the Arab world. Former Norwegian peace negotiator Terje Larson reached out to her just prior to her return to Israel asking her to join him at an international conference in Abu Dhabi. As Livni waited for a direct flight to the UAE, ground staff called ahead to Abu Dhabi making sure officials there would accept an Israeli passport. The message was that they would.
“At the conference, there were leaders from all over the region, not only those who have now normalized relations with Israel, and we discussed all different matters, including the Israeli-Palestinian peace process,” said Livni, who was invited to join a public panel for the first time ever.
“That was before the Abraham Accords, when the Arab world was still saying it would not normalize ties without Israel first achieving peace with the Palestinians,” she said. “But the atmosphere was different. I was accepted and I sat openly with those whom I had met with in secret before.”
Livni traces her covert meetings back to the period of the Annapolis Conference more than a decade earlier. It was her Palestinian peace partner, Erekat, who first lobbied Arab leaders on her behalf, urging them to meet with the Israeli leader.
Later, said Livni, Larsen stepped in, inviting her and other regional leaders to gather under the guise of his International Peace Institute (IPI). “The meetings were not public but there were others in the room from Arab countries,” she said, describing how she soon had the phone numbers of numerous Arab ministers and their assistants and began meeting with them regularly, informally, on the sidelines of international gatherings such as the U.N. General Assembly in New York and the Munich Security Conference in Germany.
“For many years I had these discreet meetings,” Livni mused. “And it was clear that if anything was leaked to the media then it would have been the end of these kinds of meetings, so I kept it completely secret.”
Among the meetings and relationships forged, Livni describes a 2008 visit to Qatar, for the Doha Forum on Democracy, Development, and Free Trade. Her appearance at the conference was made public, but while in Qatar she attended a dinner at the home of the country’s emir, Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani. There she met with the foreign ministers of Oman and other Arab states, as well and held a heated exchange with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
“We discussed Gaza, Hamas and what needs to be done,” said Livni of her meeting with the Turkish leader, whose attitude toward Israel shifted in the subsequent years. Two years later, Erdogan would expel Israeli diplomats following the Mavi Marmara flotilla incident. With the other Arab leaders at the Doha dinner, Livni said, “we discussed the situation in the region, the mutual threats, what was happening in Israel, with the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, and I was really impressed with how familiar they all were with Israel and Israeli politics.”
“It’s clear that this opened the door, it was the first understanding that we have mutual regional interests and there was the possibility to have a direct line, discreetly, to speak about these issues,” she continued. “There were also other lines [between the countries] but they were mostly on security. I was speaking with them on broader challenges.”
Throughout a decade of such meetings, Livni told JI that it was always made clear to her that normalization with the wider Middle East region – 55 Muslim and Arab states – would only come after Israelis and Palestinians made peace. For the Palestinians, she said, this backing was their main leverage.
However, she described a conversation with Erekat in 2014, during the last serious round of peace negotiations facilitated by then-Secretary of State John Kerry, after Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas refused to respond to the deal being offered. “I told him, ‘Listen, this is the time to make a decision because the Arab world cannot just stay waiting for you like this,’” Livni said she warned him. Six years later, the normalization agreements were signed between Israel, the UAE and Bahrain, catching the Palestinians off-guard.
“Frankly, I was really happy when the Abraham Accords were signed and I am hoping that more countries will join, but when it comes to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, we are now on a slippery slope towards a one-state reality,” she theorized.
While there is a possibility that the normalization agreements could make peace with the Palestinians more likely, Livni cautioned that the Accords are more likely to cause apathy on both sides. The process, she explained, has been used to sell the concept of “peace for peace” to the Israeli people. Now, she explained, that some will say, “‘What is the use of having peace with the Palestinians? We don’t need it.’ I am really worried about that.”
And Livni added, she believes it is unlikely that a U.S. administration will initiate another attempt to bring about peace or even that Israeli or Palestinian leaders would respond to such a gesture.
“In Israel, we have a government whose guidelines are not to touch this sensitive issue,” she pointed out. Even though her days as the country’s peace negotiator are now over and attitudes have clearly changed in the region, Livni said she has not given up on her vision for peace with the Palestinians.
“I believe peace is crucial for the future of Israel,” she said.
