Business

Talabat’s new HQ scores Dubai’s largest office deal since 2019

A Brookfield Asset Management Inc. joint venture in Dubai scored the city’s largest office deal since 2019 after a Middle Eastern food-delivery firm decided to relocate its regional headquarters.

Merex Investment Group, jointly owned by Canada’s Brookfield and Dubai Holdings, signed a seven-year lease with talabat for its new headquarters to service operations in nine countries across the region.

talabat, owned by Germany’s Delivery Hero SE, will take up 150,000 square feet (14,000 square meters) in two buildings in Dubai’s City Walk, an upscale shopping district. It’s the largest prime office space leased in Dubai since the pandemic upended traditional work, according to Merex Chief Executive Officer Shahram Shamsaee.

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Prospects for commercial real estate are in flux as many employees still choose to work from home and take advantage of the flexibility afforded by policies instituted since the pandemic.

Companies are responding by trying to lure them back with offers of a more attractive work space packed with amenities that allow for a more relaxed environment.

talabat is tripling the amount of office space and will move nearly 1,000 employees from its current offices, across eight floors in the Business Bay area of Dubai, to a building that used to be a department store.

The move for talabat will be in two stages starting in November and ending in the first quarter of next year.

Different attitudes

“The office space was the place you had to go before the pandemic, talabat’s CEO Tomaso Rodriguez said. Now “we have to market ourselves with our employees and the office has to become the place people want to go to.”

The new venue will include a whole floor fitted with a large pantry, pool tables and areas featuring seating for employees to meet, socialize and work together away from desks, he said.

Merex is getting similar requests from companies but they’re “not looking for a traditional office,” Shamsaee said. “They’re looking for a workplace that you can actually enjoy,” he said.

talabat’s new headquarters will be situated in a shopping district that’s had trouble with sluggish demand amid a glut in retail space across Dubai. Brookfield was brought in as a partner in Merex to help revitalize two developments that struggled to attract steady tenants despite occupying a central location and an area along the beachfront.

Merex is now reconfiguring its projects away from reliance on retail. It lured Canadian University Dubai, with around 2,000 students, to City Walk and is converting retail space into other uses such as gyms, wellness centers and even co-working areas. The goal is to push up footfall so it would support the shops and restaurants on daily basis.

Looking up

The pandemic hammered many businesses and led to “tenant failure but 2021 has seen improvements, followed by an even stronger performance in the first two months of this year, with Dubai seeing large numbers of tourists, Merex’s CEO said.

“We wanted to be a lot more than a pure retail play,” Shamsaee said. “We wanted to have that captive audience on a day-to-day basis.”

Merex manages 2 million square feet of space including 550 shops across three projects, including City Walk, The Beach in Jumeirah Beach Residence and La Mer. The joint venture was valued at 5 billion dirham ($1.4 billion) when it was formed in Dec. 2019 to own and operate the retail assets.

The partnership will look to acquire similar assets across the region “if the right opportunity comes by,” Merex’s CEO said.

But the priority over the next three years will be to boost occupancy rates and yield on the existing assets to significantly enhance their valuations, the CEO said. A possible share sale by Merex isn’t currently under consideration, Shamsaee said.

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Business

Almarai signs multiple agreements to localize jobs through training and recruitment programs

Almarai signed a cooperation memorandum with the Food Industries Polytechnic, the
Transport General Authority, and the Saudi Logistics Academy to localize jobs in the
food and beverages sector through training and rehabilitation programs ending in
employment. This came within the first international conference on the labor market,
organized by the Ministry of Human Resources and Social Development on 13 – 14
December 2023 at the King Abdulaziz Convention Center in Riyadh.

‘These agreements are part of Almarai’s corporate program for the social responsibility
to achieve localization in the food industry sector, which is one of the top priorities of the
comprehensive strategic plans in Almarai, especially since the company is one of the
largest working environments in the kingdom, with more than 9,000 Saudi employees,
including more than 900 Saudi female employees.”Fahad Aldrees, Chief Human
Resources Officer of Almarai, said.

He added that the agreements signed to train and qualify young people are part of the
integrated initiatives and training and rehabilitation programs for national human
resources in Almarai. He pointed out that the company provided about half a million
employee training hours during 2022, raising its retention rate to 90% during 2022.

It is worth mentioning that Almarai is the world’s largest vertically integrated dairy
company, and the largest food and beverage producer and distributor in the Middle
East. Almarai was ranked among LinkedIn’s top 15 Saudi companies for professional
career development for 2022.

Business

SEBA Bank rebrands to AMINA Bank and continues to write its success story

a fully licensed Swiss crypto bank, announced today its new brand identity: AMINA Bank AG. The group operates
globally from its regulated hubs in Zug, Abu Dhabi and Hong Kong, offering its clients traditional and crypto banking services.
SEBA Bank made history in 2019 by becoming one of the first FINMA-regulated institutions to provide crypto banking services. This rebrand marks a new chapter for the company, which has proudly been in operation for more than four years. AMINA Bank is inspired by the same trailblazing ambition to lead the way for its clients and to write its own future as a Swiss-
regulated crypto bank offering services to its traditional and crypto savvy clients around the globe. The name ‘AMINA’ stems from the term ‘transAMINAtion’, meaning transference of one compound to another. AMINA is a brand driven by perpetual change, bringing together the various ‘compounds’ of traditional, digital, and crypto banking to unlock new potential and
growth for our clients. This vision of change represents the transformation of our clients’ financial future. Franz Bergmueller, CEO of AMINA, said: “We are delighted to introduce the world to our new brand identity. While we say goodbye to the SEBA name, we remain forever proud of the achievements made by the group under the former brand. “Our brand signifies a new era in the company’s growth and strategy; we are a key player in crypto banking and are here to define the future of finance. With our client-focused approach, our years of traversing traditional and crypto finance, we offer a platform for investors to build
wealth safely and under the highest regulatory standards.” “We are grateful to be encouraged by our supportive and committed investors who have been very helpful, supporting the growth of the company. We thank our employees in all the regions
for their dedication and client focus. As we look forward to 2024, our ambition is to accelerate the growth of our strategic hubs in Switzerland, Hong Kong, and Abu Dhabi, and to continue our global expansion, building on all the successes we have laid down over the past years.” Current clients of AMINA Bank (formerly SEBA Bank) will be unaffected by the rebrand other than encountering the new name; all operations will be business as usual across the board. The branch office based in Abu Dhabi and the subsidiaries in Hong Kong and Singapore will subsequently apply for a name change to align with the head office in Zug.

Business

Uptime Appoints Mustapha Louni Chief Business Officer

Uptime Institute is pleased to announce the appointment of Mustapha Louni to the position of Chief Business Officer, a role specifically created to drive strategic leadership and client success. In this new role, Mr. Louni will assume responsibility for the global Uptime sales and marketing organizations and drive overall business value for all Uptime clients. He will retain his existing responsibilities overseeing operations in the Middle East, India, Africa, and the Asia Pacific regions. In this elevated capacity, Mr. Louni is poised to play a pivotal role in driving Uptime’s next phase of global expansion through strategic initiatives to enhance market awareness of the dramatically expanding global service lines and delivery capabilities of Uptime that uniquely support the global data center industry in its pursuit of ever higher performance through elevated availability, resiliency, sustainability, and cyber-security of digital infrastructure. Louni’s appointment renews and expands Uptime

Institute 39;s 30-year commitment to advancing excellence in the data center sector on a global scale. “Today we are experiencing the next phase of the one-time, planetary transformation from analog to digital. This unprecedented, once-in-a-generation growth in data center demand is primarily driven by continuing cloud adoption, the new promise of AI, and the demonstrable fact
that hybrid digital infrastructure is here to stay for the foreseeable future,” said Martin McCarthy, CEO, Uptime Institute. “These complex and nuanced market demands require a visionary talent like Mustapha Louni. He is someone who cannot only deftly manage specific aspects of the business but also remain ahead of accelerating changes and trends. He continues to earn client
trust and respect by timely delivery on demanding commitments while he also inspires and energizes colleagues and clients alike. I am delighted to announce Mr. Louni’s new position and know that he will continue to expand the impact that he has already brought to Uptime since his arrival.” In 2014, Mr. Louni joined the Uptime organization in the United Arab Emirates, leveraging his extensive experience from roles at Panduit and Schneider Electric in Paris and Dubai. As the company’s first commercial resource in the Middle East and Africa region, Mr. Louni played a pivotal role in expanding Uptime’s presence. Within a year, he successfully established what became and remains Uptime’s fastest growing regional office. Under his leadership, Uptime has
extended his impressive trajectory of growth in MEA to the Asia-Pacific regions, augmenting the Uptime workforce with dedicated team members spanning more than a dozen countries across these regions. A new Uptime office has been inaugurated in Riyadh, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA) this year, further fortifying the company’s ability to meet its commitment to sustained
growth and excellence and serve clients in critical, accelerating markets for digital infrastructure.

Uptime Institute began development of its proprietary and now globally recognized Tier Standards and its Tier Certifications 30 years ago to ensure that the mission critical computing needs of all organizations could be met with confidence and understood by executive management. Since that time, Uptime Tier Certification as well as other Uptime offerings including assessments and awards in digital infrastructure for ensuring business performance in areas of management and operations, risk and resilience, sustainability, and more recently cyber- security have gained global adoption. Uptime’s expanding success is based on delivering a
unique business service that is based upon unparalleled engineering excellence and technical mastery, while remaining vendor independent and technology agnostic.