Hello from Abu Dhabi, مرحبا من ابو ظبي,
This month’s multiple exchanges and discussions facilitated by the LTIO mostly focused on the important topic of innovation and how to create synergies and opportunities for startups and grownups between the Gulf and Luxembourg. For example, a well-attended webinar on UAE-Luxembourg tech startup opportunities, hosted by Luxinnovation and Masdar City in Abu Dhabi, took place early October. For those interested in watching or even replaying the webinar, a recording can be found at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dWGdy4KgksM . The webinar was actually followed up by a visit of a Luxembourg delegation to Masdar City, a fascinating place that attracts a great deal of attention and is certainly worth a visit for everybody coming to Abu Dhabi. It is one of the world’s most sustainable urban communities, a low-carbon development made up of a rapidly growing clean-tech cluster, business free zone and residential neighbourhood.
The LTIO staff had quite a few day trips to Dubai this month to attend GITEX (Gulf Information Technology Exhibition), one of the largest tech fairs in the world and the first edition of the Dubai Future Forum, organized by the Dubai Future Foundation, a partner of Luxinnovation. A dedicated article on these two events and related meetings features in this newsletter. The participation of four companies from Luxembourg in this year’s GITEX is already bearing fruits.
The Gulf region, which represents some 20% of the world economy, is expected to be the fastest growing region in the world this year with around 5% and a fair number of Luxembourg companies are interested in expanding their activities here, which underscores the importance of the regional dimension of the LTIO’s mission.
At the same time, Luxembourg’s attractiveness for FDI and talents remains undisputed as confirmed by the EY Attractiveness study. This study further suggests that Luxembourg can be an excellent test bed for businesses that want to adapt and localize their products to the EU market or to quote “try it out of Luxembourg”.
During the exchanges with local stakeholders, it became again abundantly clear that we can learn a lot from each other in various sectors. The recurrent message from the interlocutors to us was: “we love partnership”.
A case in point was the visit to the UAE by a health delegation led by Dr. Jean-Claude Schmit, Luxembourg’s Chief Medical Officer, to share ideas and best practices regarding the digitalization of health data, an area where the UAE are well advanced. The seven Emirates have put into place systems that allow the integration of all medical information of a patient in a single electronic medical record, thus increasing efficiency. In addition, consistency in data gathering can lead to better research and create a conducive environment for the continuous development of a health tech cluster.
On another note, I would like to inform the readers of this newsletter that Nadia Benchouk, who many of you know, has chosen to leave the LTIO after almost 7 years of dedicated service in pursuit of other career options. Our loss is someone else’s gain. Many thanks and every best wish to Nadia!
مع السلامة
Jean-Marie Frentz
Executive Director, LTIO Abu Dhabi