By: Mahmoud Gamal
Abu Dhabi – Mubasher: The industrial sector has been the driving force for the UAE’s economy, which led the government to take a raft of strategies in a bid to develop this sector and accomplish sustainable economic development.
To this end, the GCC nation has launched the UAE Vision 2021, focusing on upgrading a slew of sectors, chief among them the education, healthcare, public services, housing, and infrastructure sectors.
Future industries
The “Abu Dhabi Economic Vision 2030”, set by the Economic Vision Taskforce and approved by the Abu Dhabi Executive Council, has paid great interest to knowledge-based future industries, analysts told Mubasher.
While the Dubai Industrial Strategy 2030 is aimed to create an international hub for knowledge-based innovation and sustainable industrial activities through enhancing industrial coherence and integration with other economic sectors particularly strategic ones, along with creating an attractive investment environment through a set of initiatives and incentives, they said.
Key pillars
The UAE considers the manufacturing sector as the mainstay of its economic development in light of the Arab nation’s strenuous efforts to shift to knowledge, innovation-based economy, Lenie Assaad, associate, Allied Investment Partners, told Mubasher.
Giving priority to the industrial sector is a major step toward boosting the UAE’s competitiveness, she added.
Challenges
The UAE is facing a plethora of challenges to maintain a sustainable, competitive industrial sector, Assaad noted.
On the domestic scale, some companies fail to survive against predatory pricing squeezing margins, she explained.
In an effort to address this challenge, Abu Dhabi has launched up an Industrial Development and Regulation Bureau to advise, protect and monitor the industrial sector’s performance, in addition to catalysing economic development through policies, plans, and programmes of relevance to the sector.
Alongside predatory pricing, gaining access to enough capital to be categorised as a large-scale industrial production is also a big challenge faced, according to Assaad. Accordingly, the UAE’s industrial sector is heavily reliant on commercial lenders, constantly competing with funds required for other remaining industries, she said.
To increase economic value amongst high levels of competition, the UAE’s industrial sector requires a skilled workforce properly equipped with the latest innovation, the financial analyst pointed out.
To get over such obstacles, a continuum of promising government initiatives are needed with the aim to build a sustainable industrial centre, Assaad noted.
Industrial investments
The UAE government has set a group of strategies to attract an amount of $70 billion in industrial investments by 2025 in order to raise the share of the industrial sector to 25% of the nation’s gross domestic product (GDP).
This comes along with the UAE’s three major developmental frameworks, namely the UAE vision 2021, the Abu Dhabi Economic Vision 2030 and Dubai Industrial Strategy 2030.
The oil-rich country is supporting economic diversification by shifting to an innovation and knowledge-based economy, contributing to a more sustainable growth within the nation.
This will facilitate access to capital, in addition to providing the necessary innovative instruments to the workforce, enabling the UAE to compete on an international level.
Assaad said that the UAE’s industrial sector is expected to undergo a promising growth in the coming months.
Translated by: Kholoud Mohamed Hussein
