From the editor's desk

This publication arose out of a remarkable year. Like other companies, and other countries, our journalists and editors initially struggled to pull any narrative out of the pandemic. The first months were chaos and damage control. Our contacts went silent; everyone was working to stay safe and to make sure that their organizations remained a going concern.

This period was temporary. Within months, it became clear that some countries had acted effectively to control the spread of disease, and that others had struggled. The same was true of companies. Effective leadership became immensely important. It was not enough to have an efficient organization.

The actions of some leaders inspired The Business Year’s first special report of the pandemic. Titled Saudi Arabian Leadership Through COVID-19, we spoke with some of the key decisionmakers in the Kingdom about the government and private sector response to the pandemic. The stories of the behind the scenes work and the difficult decisions that composed Saudi Arabia’s covid response were fascinating. Together, they created an image of a country reacting to a new threat.

What is documented in this publication is different. This publication is about adaptation.

As the pandemic dragged on every country developed regulations to manage the spread of disease and react in real time, with varying levels of success. Saudi Arabia was different. The Kingdom was uniquely positioned to adopt game-changing technologies with unprecedented speed.

The Vision 2030 reform program had spent, legislated, and restructured the public sector and the economy to adopt a series of technological advances over the next decade. The pandemic pushed some technological solutions to be adopted almost overnight. Government targets for the decade for adoption of digital payments and application-based health management tools were achieved in months.

The public sector’s response to the pandemic also demonstrated the depth of the reform process in that area over the past 5+ years. A bureaucracy once known for being sluggish and requiring extensive paperwork was suddenly communicating with citizens exclusively through online platforms that had already been developed. Customs and the ports would have ground to a halt in 2014, but by 2020 the government had already implemented a technological solution that made going contactless possible.

The pandemic served as a validation of many of Saudi Arabia’s internal reforms. It also created massive opportunities for some of the nation’s up and coming businesses. In this publication, we show how technology completely changed the Kingdom during the pandemic. Things will never be the same.