Emaar plans ‘female’ version of Burj Khalifa as Dubai Creek Harbour project gains pace
▶ ‘New downtown’ to feature mall allowing electric vehicles to drive through, says Emaar founder
Emaar Properties’s proposed skyscraper at Dubai Creek Harbour will be a smaller, more elegant structure than previously planned, founder Mohamed Alabbar has said.
The cable-tied tower, designed by the Spanish-Swiss architect Santiago Calatrava, was originally meant to be 100 metres taller than Burj Khalifa.
In August, Mr Alabbar said the tower was being redesigned, without giving further details.
Addressing Sharjah Entrepreneurship Festival at the weekend, Mr Alabbar said the new design had been approved and construction had started on the tower, which will not be as tall as Burj Khalifa.
“We did something like male and female [towers], so Burj Khalifa will be the male and Creek Tower will be the female,” he said.
Mr Alabbar then explained why Emaar “changed … minds and … redesigned” the tower, the centrepiece of the six square kilometre project.
“We build these beautiful towers because we make money out of the apartments that look at these towers. The [project] tower doesn’t make any money,” he said.
“Everybody wants to have an apartment in Paris overlooking the Eiffel Tower, right? So we said ‘listen, our buildings are only 50 storeys tall, why do we have to build something one kilometre tall?’”
The Dubai Creek Harbour site is twice the size of Downtown Dubai but will not have a shopping centre comparable in size to Dubai Mall.
“We are also building a new mall [at Dubai Creek Harbour] … but I think we are going to a new generation,” Mr Alabbar said. Describing it as “one of the most interesting avenues”, he said for the first time cars will be able to enter the mall. “This will be very, very unique – [cars will be] electric only.”
Mr Alabbar, who is also the founder of Noon, said there are no plans to list the ecommerce giant in the immediate future. “I think at the end of the day we have to list,” he said. “I’m not really sure [when it will be], the board have to decide but definitely in the coming few years.”
The Dubai entrepreneur launched the $1 billion e-commerce platform in collaboration with Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund, the Public Investment Fund, in 2017.
Mr Alabbar described founding of Noon as “one of the most difficult challenges of my life”.
“I started at the age of 60 – I wasn’t exactly 19 years old so I had to understand the difference between iPhone and Samsung, which is a big challenge for me,” he said.
Mr Alabbar said he was lucky to find good people to help him build the company, which has evolved from ecommerce into a super app that offers grocery shopping, food delivery and peer-to-peer payments.
“Noon today is an incredible story,” he said.
“Actually, it’s not even ecommerce company any more because ecommerce has changed. If you want to do ecommerce, I don’t think you will make it any more because Amazon do not make [big] profit out of ecommerce; they make profit out of the cloud business.”
Mr Alabbar said the company “reinvented” itself and is growing at between 30 per cent and 40 per cent annually.
He said Noon, which operates in the UAE, Saudi Arabia and Egypt, sells four million products and attracts one billion visits a year.
“It’s probably one of … the only companies in ecommerce that in five to six years be profitable, which is very rare but then our model is so different.”