His Excellency Hesham Abdullah Al Qassim

Actually, my main group is working. We are a company which is managing a lot of assets of the government of Dubai. We have three verticals of businesses. Vertical number one is the property management. We have almost 30,000 units under management, and the property management we consider to be one of the largest property management in the town. The second vertical is the industrial land. We have 27 zones of industrial zones, consisting of 5,200 parcels of land plus 500 million square feet of size, and this rail zone is a very important business for Dubai. The third vertical of businesses is the leisure and hospitality. In the leisure side, we are managing two golf courses. The first one is the Emirates Golf Club, which is the famous golf club in the UAE and was the first golf course in the country. The second is the Dubai League golf course, which is again one of the important golf courses in the town. The Emirates Golf Club is considered to be number 90 in the world including the United States of America, and number 10 in the world excluding the United States of America, because the 91st best club in the world is in the United States, and after that, from that place, the other countries will come, so we will be number 10 excluding the United States in terms of hospitality. In 2002 and 2007, we inherited seven properties with 2,200 rooms. From 2007 to 2014, we built almost five more properties with another 3,000 rooms, which has added up our room numbers to 5,000 rooms today. In our pipeline for hospitality, we're going to have 15 hotels in 2019, and these 15 hotels are going to give us another 5,000 extra rooms to our inventory. These 15 hotels are going to be mostly focused on three and four-star hotels because that is the product which the Dubai market is missing in their hospitality industries, and we are trying to mitigate that. All of that will accumulate to the vision of 2020, so we will have the right offering for all the travelers coming through to Dubai for that exhibition and give them a quite good range of product. In the hospitality industry, Dubai is a very success story, and the whole story stands behind the vision of His Highness Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum. He had a very long vision, a very important meaning. Actually, he has built the city, he has built the country, and he's driving it in a way to keep everyone focused on his vision. So every entity within Dubai government, whether they are governmental, semi-governmental, or private, they follow his vision and they make the city very dynamic and always trying to compete with other cities in the world. And from that point, Dubai has become the hub of travel and tourism. Dubai is a very dynamic city even before 2020. We don't need to wait for that time to come. Every three months, whoever is a frequent traveler to Dubai will see something new. So I think Dubai is adopting and changing very fast to the limit that it doesn't need to wait for 2020. It's a very dynamic city, very fast-growing, and has great leadership. Sheikh Mohammed makes sure that every day they introduce new ideas to the city. This conference is very important for the industry itself. First of all, as we mentioned in the past, this city has become the hub for tourism and travel, and we have almost all the operators functioning in the city. The market is very dynamic, and for the operators to learn about the market, the economics of it, and how they can adapt to the change, and how to offer the product which matches consumer perception, they need to have this kind of conferences to sit with the owners, think about the market, look at the buy market, look at the region, and try to discuss how they can expand in the future. And as I told you, this is one of the markets which has a lot of potential for expansion in the hospitality industry for Dubai and regionally. It's not only Dubai; it's Dubai and the region, and this is why this kind of conference is very important to be held for sharing views and exchanging ideas about the regional market.