Annual Investment Meeting 2022 Reinforces UAE’s Stand as a Global Investment and Startup Hub

The Annual Investment Meeting (AIM 2022) focuses on today's foreign direct investment trends and prospects under the theme ‘investments in sustainable innovation for a thriving future’. This blockbuster event brings along nations and companies from all around the globe under one roof to generate breakthroughs in investments for this post-pandemic world. 

The mega business, innovation and investment event has a variety of insightful conferences and forums, with industry experts as key speakers and panellists, for guests to attend. The key highlight of this is the SME conference, Start-up conference, Future Cities and FDI & FPI. Esteemed speakers and panellists throughout the day have been conducting workshops, providing insights and elucidating why the UAE has an ideal economic climate for start-ups and business to thrive.

Start-up nations organized by KPMG elaborated the contributions of the global innovation and economic transformation with economic prosperity and wealth creation. The firm explained what the basic framework of building a start-up ecosystem requires namely, -- Building base infrastructure, access to market and access to funding. It even elucidated on how potential start-ups can be strengthened with by trade fairs that provide international and domestic exposure and through venture capitalists. It further added that start-ups positively impact entrepreneurship development, fostering innovation and drives inbound investment alongside boosting local manufacturing and productivity. 

At an SME conference ‘Employees: The Backbone of SMEs’ focussed on how people are the spine of any business intrigued multiple business owners as they invested their time to listen to the insightful session where Nandini Nadarajah the Founder and Executive Director said, “During the Covid-19 pandemic everyone was faced with challenges especially with people related issues. Management experts had to wear a hat to focus solely on HR issues and emotional intelligence became a big subject.”

She even gave business owners and operators a solution regarding this by saying, “One solution is quite simple and begs the question – How can we add value to the people side of the business? Re-train the employees and focus the transformation and show them that they are valued and that’s how your people will drive your business,” to which she was greeted with an applause.

Conferences were not restricted to just the Middle East as many countries set up shop and explained their business and investment aspirations to onlookers and guests alike. During the ‘Regional and Global Integration – SME Coalition for Africa’, Nigest Halle, Founder and Executive Director, Centre for Accelerated Women Economic Empowerment said, “We need more government support to women entrepreneurs if we want to lift the African economy. We need institutional machinery in our system to help grow SME’s and empower women in our industries”. Carl Manlan, Vice President, Social Impact for Visa and Eastern Europe, Middle East and Africa added to this by saying, “We need better policies and logistics to enhance trade in Africa. We need to identify the markets from which we can source products and encourage better trade relations within Africa.”

AIM 2022 is helping propagate the UAE’s goal as an investment and start-up hub by helping SMEs find new sources of funding through the event as well as helping start-ups raise early stage venture capital as well as helping businesses prepare themselves for new futuristic cities. This aligns with the UAE’s flourishing sustainable and economic model and its blooming start-up culture.