Page 294 - Aamir Rehman - Dubai & Co Global Strategies for Doing Business in the Gulf States-McGraw-Hill (2007)

276 Dubai & Co.

self-funding. The GCC should not have to rely on “grants” from the
head office for long. Typically, the best way to build a regional busi-
ness is with carefully considered up-front investment, followed by
a short period of ongoing support until the business generates
enough profit to cover its costs. In the boom environment of the
2000s, most multinationals with strong product propositions and
brands can reach profitability very quickly. Some professional serv-
ices firms have found that their GCC offices “sell out” and are
stretched thin from very early on, making these offices more prof-
itable on a per-person basis than their counterparts elsewhere.

HEADQUARTERS DUBAI
Since the late 1990s, Dubai—and, to a degree, the UAE overall—has
emerged as the strongly preferred location for multinational firms’
head offices in the Gulf. It has become increasingly common for the
Dubai office to oversee businesses well beyond the Gulf—very
often spanning all of the Middle East and North Africa and some-
times even further. The electronics firm Canon, for example, has
a wide set of Middle Eastern markets reporting through Dubai, as
well as a set of French-speaking African countries. In a surprising
2007 move, the prominent and controversial energy services com-
pany Halliburton announced it was moving its CEO to Dubai
in order to focus on growth in the Eastern Hemisphere. All of
Halliburton’s global business, therefore, is envisioned to report to
Dubai.
The rationale for choosing Dubai as a regional headquarters
office is straightforward. One reason is the emirate’s superb infra-
structure: both its “hard” infrastructure like shipping links, air-
ports, and power; and its “soft” infrastructure like the free zones
allowing 100 percent foreign ownership, corporate parks, and avail-
3
able talent. The second is Dubai’s liberal-lifestyle policies that
allow expatriates to maintain the lifestyle—including norms
of dressing, eating and drinking, nightlife, shopping, and more—of
Western countries. Dubai’s permissive policy on lifestyles surprises
many visitors and makes it a “fun” destination for senior manage-
ment from the global head office or from other regions.
Both elements of Dubai’s appeal—infrastructure and lifestyle—
have stood in stark contrast with the facilities and norms of other