[photopress:jebelali.jpg,full,alignright]Dubai Logistics City wants China to see Dubai as the logical center for distribution of China’s goods. This may seem a fairly daft idea on the face of it but it has considerable merit and almost a feeling of inevitability.
To understand you need to go back to 1833. This was when the Al Maktoum dynasty of the Bani Yas tribe left the settlement of Abu Dhabi and took over the town of Dubai, ‘without resistance’. On 2 December 1971 Dubai, together with Abu Dhabi and five other emirates, formed the United Arab Emirates. The UAE has remained but the amount of ‘United’ is balanced by a certain amount of inter-emirate jealousy.
Althought there are some oil reserves in Dubai they are almost irrelevant. Where its money comes from is intelligent investment and development. Dubai and its twin across the Dubai creek, Deira, have become important ports of call for Western manufacturers. (Jebel Ali, seen here and constructed in the 1970s, has the largest man-made harbour in the world.) Most of the new city’s banking and financial centres are headquartered in the port area.
Dubai is an important tourist destination and port, but also increasingly developing as a hub for service industries such as IT and finance, with the new Dubai International Financial Centre (DIFC).
Transport links are bolstered by its rapidly-expanding Emirates Airline, founded by the government in 1985 and still state-owned. Based at Dubai International Airport it carries about a million passengers a month.
Now the Maktoums want Dubai to become the logistics center connecting, as it were, Asia and the rest of the world. Gulf Daily News reports that Dubai Logistics City is a logistics hub boasting unrivalled infrastructure. As Gulf Daily News possibly would cease to exist without the benevolence of the Maktoums that statement may be colored a little. But the intention is to woo the market of the future at Air Cargo China 2006 which will be held September 19-22 at the Shanghai New International Expo Centre.
Source: Khaleej Times.
You must log in to post a comment.