Dubai Internet City gets massive start-up interest
FREEZONE TRYING TO MAKE IT LESS CUMBERSOME FOR FIRMS TO LAUNCH
Dubai Internet City (DIC), the city’s technology freezone, said yesterday that it had seen applications for its start-up programme boom since it introduced the in5 system back in 2013.
The initiative allows small firms to register in the technology park for Dh14,500 annually, providing entrepreneurs with a trade licence, four work visas, and shared office space.
A complaint often voiced by the UAE’s start-ups is the difficulty and cost of establishing a company. Many early-stage entrepreneurs, who have yet to generate any revenue, face red tape and fees running in to the tens of thousands of dirhams to establish themselves as a business entity in the UAE.
“We are trying to remove the red tape, remove the administration, and make it easier to start a technology company in Dubai,” said Ammar Al Malek, executive director of Dubai Internet City.
Of the 120 active start-ups incorporated in Dubai Internet City, 58 per cent have reported a 50 per cent year-on-year growth, according to the freezone, with more than 90 per cent of the firms claiming to have immediate expansion plans.
“We want start-ups to focus on what they do best — their business. We’ll help them with everything else,” Al Malek told Gulf News in an interview at the STEP Conference in Dubai.
At the end of 2017, the programme expanded to include in5 Media, and in5 Design, providing infrastructure such as recording studios, 3D printers, and professional cameras to start-ups.
Al Malek says that in recent years, he has seen the number of companies touting artificial intelligence (AI), e-commerce, big data, and cybersecurity solutions grow rapidly.
“We’re focusing on these ones because there’s synergies in them,” he said, adding that there were no plans currently to expand the initiative to any other industries following December’s inclusion of media and design.
On the rise of other freezones as technology hubs, including Dubai International Financial Centre’s FinTech Hive, and Abu Dhabi Global Market’s FinTech Innovation Centre, the senior official said that he does not view them as competition.
‘Shared eco-system’
“Dubai Internet City is unique, and it has taken us 17 years to build this network, but all of Dubai is working together towards building a shared ecosystem,” Al Malek said.
Earlier this month, the freezone announced that members of the DIC community had collectively attracted Dh7.8 billion in funding since its inception as a business hub. Over the last 12 months particularly, several DIC partners have attracted strong investments, officials said.
These include the acquisition of Souq.com by US e-commerce giant Amazon for an undisclosed sum. The deal is estimated to have been in the region of Dh2.2 billion ($600 million). Dubai-based ride-hailing app Careem became a unicorn, referring to a start-up valued at a billion dollars or more, in December 2016.
Industry experts say there are wider opportunities amid risk, despite many people’s fear of automation stealing jobs.
“I think technology disruption has been killing jobs for hundreds of years and technology has been creating jobs and this is not something new. It has happened before,” David Suarez, people and organisation leader at PwC, said at the sixth Step conference 2018, the largest experiential tech festival in the Middle East.
The phase of adoption of technology is 20 times faster than 500 years ago, he said and added that computers have been doing things that they have not done before. They have been diagnosing illnesses, can write an entire magazine article and drive autonomously. This is something “unique”.
For the first time in 15 years, he said that studies have shown that productivity keeps on increasing but employment keeps flat. “That basically means we are not able to keep up with technology evolution. In that, it creates a lot of threat but there is also a huge amount of opportunity with it. It is not about job replacement, it is more about jobs augmentation.
“Many companies are not yet ready for automation apart from the companies that are born digital natives. In the Middle East, the awareness is definitely there. The person to machine interface is getting blurred and we need people to work with them. I wouldn’t be surprised if we got robots as colleagues in the future,” he said.
According to a study PwC did last year in the US, 38 per cent of jobs will be replaced by automation by 2030.
“Let us face that there is an issue and we have to deal with it. The other element is the opportunity. People can be fearful of it but the opportunity is huge. In the study, we also found that 38 per cent of our respondents were hopeful about the future supposed to 18 per cent of those who are fearful,” he said.
IQ Sayed, technologist at Careem,
of 120 start-ups incorporated in the DIC reported 50% growth year on year
said that there is basically no industry that is new to disruption. Anticipating disruption is extremely important. For a start-up like Careem, he said that automation is not really a choice but rather an imperative.
“The pace at which we are growing just catering to our customers and captains [drivers] is just not possible for us to hire for the different roles we have at Careem. So automation is essential for us and for a lot of start-ups and not just a choice,” he said.
“We always feel that automation movement or revolution is not something new but it has always been there, it goes as far as the industrial revolution. With the computing evolution, the pace of things has changed. Things are changing a lot faster but eventually it comes down to adapting, learning and growing,” he said.
Sayed said that the valuable skills in the future will be software engineering, programmers, data scientist, AI and machine learning, customer care and managing complexity.