Countries Of The World Highlight Investment Opportunities At Concluding Annual Investment Meeting 2022 Today (Thursday, 31 March)

Countries around the world put forward an ambitious program to secure Foreign Direct Investments to their countries at the 11^th edition of Annual Investment Meeting, which wrapped up today at Dubai Exhibition Centre in EXPO 2020 Dubai in sync with the conclusion of EXPO 2020 Dubai.

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’.

The three-day initiative by the UAE Ministry of Economy brought together investors, venture capitalists, private & financial institutions, and governments under one roof.

AIM focussed on a wide array of issues that boost the global economic growth, including endorsing and boosting investments towards sustainability and innovation through several key activities.

Among its 6 multi-faceted pillars, AIM 2022 touched on a wide diversity of topics, including Foreign Direct Investment (FDI), Small & Medium Enterprises, Start-ups, Future Cities, Foreign Portfolio Investment (FPI) and the 50 Projects initiative. The pillars managed in helping participating countries maximize their opportunities through several segments.

SIEMENS

Big Data firm, Siemens partnered with the University of Birmingham to embark on a 10-year partnership with Dubai to work towards world-class digitalization to build District 2020’s ecosystem of partners and connect business, governments and universities to drive growth, promote education and innovation promoting cross-collaboration.

Additionally, Siemens spoke at AIM 2022 about the necessity of Industrial Cybersecurity and presented solutions to protect the organizations’ systems, networks, and programs from cyber threats. The presentation highlighted modern security measures with deep graded security architecture/ protection systems, to roadblock a potential attacker.

Siemens participation comes at a time when shop-floor landscape has changed from isolated islands to highly complex networks without transparency about “normal” communication and automatic detection of malware. Furthermore, Industrial Anomaly Detection provides transparency over assets and data exchange as well as enhanced security through continuous and proactive identification of changes in the system.

The company uses an advanced machine learning system to correlate current traffic against the baseline of normal operations. Some of the critical threats to industrial and control systems as listed by the tech-firm are – Infiltration of Malware via internet or intranet, compromising of extranet and cloud components, social engineering and phishing and Distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) Attacks amongst others.

IE UNIVERSITY

The IE University at AIM 2022 spoke along the topic of ‘Customer Discovery: What’s the Problem and What Needs to be Validated’, led by speaker Leticia Ponce Hernandez, Start-up Lab Director at IE University. The presentation highlighted the steps to customer discovery saying that step 1 focuses in defining the mission, vision, and core values of the company while creating a hypothetical business model and validates and build on through interviews and informal conversations. The next step is ‘Customer Validation’ and to examine scalability and display the repeatability of the viable hypothesis. In this stage, companies would also have to develop a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) which is an early version of the product/services that serves to validate the potential customer. The next few steps focus on customer creation through demand for a solution and company building by transforming the start-up into a company focussed on execution.

FORT LAUDERDALE

Fort Lauderdale, a city on the South-eastern coast of Florida, presented itself as a city on the move with investment opportunities. It focuses on transportation, water infrastructure, universal broadband, clean power, pollution remediation and climate resiliency. Notable Florida landmarks were used as precedent of successful investments in the past namely – DRV PNK Stadium and the City Auditorium – which has benefitted the investors.

GLOBAL IPA PERCEPTION STUDY 2022 Revealed in AIM 2022

The study has discussed how companies have evolved and pivoted and the issues of economic diversification that they faced leading to the rise in prominence of FDI. Recognizing the positive effects of investments in supporting economic growth and sustainable development, governments across the globe have established Investment Promotion Agencies (IPAs) to create awareness of existing investment opportunities, attract investors that can foster job creation and productivity growth, and facilitate their establishment and expansion in the economy. Many of the industry leaders shared their perspective on the issues faced as well as their thoughts on Global Agencies.

“Supply chain crisis was a key concern across many industries and sectors during the pandemic, as it had a dual supply and demand shock on the supply chains. Even though companies are increasingly putting supply chain resilience high on the agenda, supply chains that are tried and tested are cost-effective not to mention that restructuring or relocating production can be significantly costly. Our experience with SMEs indicates that complexity and cost of re-establishing the supply chain is far greater than if companies maintained a minimum operational level to prepare for the recovery,” said Quan Zhao, Trade Policy Advisor, Division of Market Development, International Trade Center (ITC).

Paul Wessendorp, Chief, Investment Promotion Section, United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) said: “From the perspective of IPAs, they have had to face volatile FDI flows and challenges which came on top of a longer-term slowdown in global FDI flows, This has compelled IPAs to change strategies: focus on targeting sectors and industries that are in line with renewed national sustainability and resilience priorities such as renewable energy, digitalization, and health; strengthen their policy advocacy role to improve the investment environment; increase attention for investment facilitation; and provide more investor aftercare. IPAs also need to respond to changing motivations of investors in selecting investment locations with multinational enterprises (MNEs) looking for more resilience in their production lines due to tensions and geopolitical factors. As a result, MNEs may diversify or restore part of their economic activities which can create new opportunities for IPAs.”