Saudi women-only motorshow opens in Jeddah
Women flocked to Le Mall in Jeddah on Thursday to check out the kingdom’s first car exhibition aimed at women, a few months after Saudi Arabia granted them the right to drive.
Pink, orange and yellow balloons hung in the mall’s showroom as women posed for photos and selfies in front of the cars. One woman in the driver’s seat fixed her face cover. Another wrapped her turquoise-painted fingernails around the steering wheel, feeling it out.
In a decree issued in September, King Salman ordered by June an end to the ban on women drivers, a conservative tradition that has limited women’s mobility and been seen by rights activists as an emblem of their suppression.
Saudi Arabia is the only country that bans women drivers. The landmark royal decree has been hailed as proof of a new progressive trend in the deeply conservative Muslim kingdom.
Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, 32, is the face of that change. Many young Saudis regard his recent ascent to power as proof their generation is taking a central place in running a country whose patriarchal traditions have for decades made power the province of the old and blocked women’s progress.
“I’ve always been interested in cars, but we didn’t have the ability to drive,” said Ghada al-ali, a customer. “And now I’m very interested in buying a car but I would like the payments and prices to not be very high.”
Saudi Arabia’s cost of living has risen after the government hiked domestic gas prices and introduced value-added tax (VAT) in January.
The exhibition focused on fuelefficient cars and provided a team of saleswomen to help their new customer base. The showroom carried signs emblazoned with the slogan “Drive and Shop”, a play on words in Arabic, using the female form of the verbs.
“It is known that women are the largest section who shop in malls,” said Sharifa Mohammad, the heads the exhibition’s saleswomen. “This whole mall is run by women anyway. All the cashiers are women. Everyone in the restaurants are women.”
China’s Bitmain Technologies is eyeing bitcoin mining sites in Quebec, a company spokesman told Reuters, as expectations of a potential Chinese crackdown on cryptocurrency mining make the energy-rich Canadian province an attractive alternative.
China has grown into one of the world’s biggest sources of cryptocurrency mining but there are signs Beijing is increasing scrutiny of the sector’s players and may ask local authorities to regulate their power use. Bitmain Technologies, operator of some of the largest mining farms in the country, is among several companies looking to expand overseas.
Bitmain spokesman Nishant Sharma said in an e-mail yesterday that the company was looking at sites in Quebec and is in talks with regional power authorities in the province. It is also planning to expand in Switzerland.
Bitcoin mining consumes large quantities of energy because it uses computers to solve complex math puzzles to validate transactions in the cryptocurrency, which are written to the blockchain, or digital ledger. The first miner to solve the problem is rewarded in bitcoin and the transaction is added to the blockchain.
While Beijing has not issued any official edict on the bitcoin mines, two Chinese miners told Reuters that local authorities had grown more unwilling to allow expansion and had started to shut down some mines in late 2017, as China clamped down on cryptocurrencies.
Last September, Chinese authorities banned so-called initial coin offerings and ordered Beijing-based cryptocurrency exchanges to halt trading.
“We, and from what I understand many of our peers, are already making plans to go overseas,” said Li Wei, Chief Executive of Zqminer, a Wuhan-based company that sells bitcoin mining equipment and has mines in three Chinese provinces.
Globally, regulators are increasingly voicing concerns about cryptocurrencies, which are not backed by any central bank, because of their volatility and worries about risks to investors. China, which has strict capital controls, is also worried that cryptocurrencies could facilitate illegal fund flows and breed financial risks.
In Canada, Hydro Quebec described a potential sales pipeline of around 30 large cryptocurrency miners after a campaign by the public utility to attract data centres to the province triggered a flurry of interest from bitcoin miners in 2017.
“Of the world’s top five largest blockchain players, we have at least three or four,” David Vincent, director of business development at Hydro Quebec distribution, said in an interview on Wednesday.