Over the years, the conference has evolved into one of the region’s most recognised platforms for discussions around innovation, entrepreneurship, investment, and economic transformation. This year’s edition focused heavily on the intersection of technology, capital, sustainability, and policy, reflecting the region’s growing role within the global digital economy.

“This year’s MENA Conference highlights how the region is positioning itself at the intersection of capital, innovation, and global economic transformation,” said Florin Vasvari, Executive Dean of Executive Education, Middle East, at London Business School.

The agenda explored themes including global capital flows, fintech, climate resilience, artificial intelligence, and the financing landscape surrounding the region’s technology ecosystem. Discussions also examined how regional markets are evolving to support stronger startup ecosystems, deeper capital markets, and long-term economic competitiveness.

Artificial intelligence emerged as one of the defining themes of the conference, with speakers discussing how regional organisations can build sustainable AI capabilities through investments in infrastructure, talent, data, and capital. Conversations also explored how fintech is reshaping financial infrastructure and improving access to digital financial services across the region.

Throughout the event, senior executives, policymakers, founders, and investors shared perspectives on the MENA region’s evolving role within global markets, as governments and businesses increasingly position technology and innovation at the centre of long-term economic diversification strategies.

The conference also highlighted London Business School’s growing regional engagement, following the opening of its executive office in Riyadh alongside its longstanding Dubai campus, strengthening its support for leadership development and executive education across the GCC.

Shipsy will host its flagship virtual event, limitless summit 2022, on September 20th. Global supply chain and logistics leaders across industries will share critical insights on navigating “The road to sustainable and cost-efficient logistics.”

The Limitless Summit is an influential gathering of leading global logistics, supply chain, and operations professionals. It is designed to build a community of industry leaders and experts to enable an open forum for sharing knowledge, key trends, and best practices that drive better decision-making and accelerated business performance in a rapidly evolving logistics ecosystem.

Over 500+ delegates from 350 organizations joined the previous edition of the event. The speaker list for the upcoming edition will include Ekhlaque Bari, Chief Information Officer, Jubilant food works; Walid Shabana, CTO & Co-founder, Rabbit Mart, Santosh Abbimane, Group Chief Financial & Transformation Officer, DTDC; Bassel El Koussa, CEO & Co-founder, Quiqup; Gaurav Arora, Vice President – Strategy & Operations, Ferns N Petals; Zeeshan Mukhi, Director of Customer Experience, South Asia, Maersk; Soham Chokshi, CEO & Co-founder, Shipsy and many more.

“End customers, evolving environmental regulations, and increasing delivery costs are driving businesses to leverage supply chain sustainability as a competitive advantage. This is where the digital transformation of logistics processes will make a winning difference. Digitization is helping businesses battle growing carbon emissions by drastically reducing miles traveled, eliminating empty miles, shrinking trip volumes, and proactively gaining visibility of emissions across multimodal freight movement,” says Soham Chokshi, CEO and Co-founder, Shipsy.

While the overarching theme is “More for Less: The Road to Sustainable and Cost-Efficient Logistics,” industry experts will highlight best practices and insights on ‘Balancing the Triad with Tech: Customer Experience, Profitability, and Sustainability,’ and ‘Enabling Sustainability in Cross Border Logistics.’

The full-day summit highlighted Huawei’s latest partner programs and outlined the company’s strategic plans for digitalization in the Middle East, in order to move on to next stage by adopting the latest AI technologies and cloud computing. Huawei’s channel strategy for 2018 centers on the empowerment of its channel partners to deliver the latest, most comprehensive ICT solutions to their customers by embracing a collaborative, win-win approach to partners, competitors, and the industry as a whole.

In partnership with GAPP, a Diamond sponsor of the summit, Huawei launched their GTM (“Go To Market”) Strategy, which focuses on catering to Middle East market requirements by building an enhanced service portfolio with GAPP serving as systems integrators. Other partners who supported the event were Redington,  Microsoft and STME, CNBM Technology, Enterprise Systems, net., SAP and Suse.

Huawei has updated some star products and solutions, including the Agile Campus 5.0 network solution, All-flash Storage Dorado product, Prefabricated Modular Data Center and all new M-Serials Artificial Intelligence (AI) enabled video surveillance camera. Huawei also displayed its newest product portfolio, including the launch of its FusionServer G5500 Heterogeneous Server. This new server is designed for data center deployment, and uses a fully modular design, with independent CPUs. It is a heterogeneous computing platform for AI, HPC, intelligent cloud, and video analytics. The G5500 supports GPUDirect RDMA as well as P2P interconnect technologies. It supports one-click topology switching, which provides the optimal heterogeneous topology configurations for diverse workloads.

A variety of senior executives from Huawei Enterprise Business Group shared their thoughts on the latest products and technologies, the broader trends in the industry, and business perspectives relating to their regional partners.

“We see our long-term enterprise strategy in the region cantered around building an ecosystem through which Huawei can help our Middle East channel partners meet their customers’ needs with enhanced connectivity and improved user experience, across different domains,” said Alaa ElShimy, Vice President and Managing Director, Huawei Enterprise Middle East. “Huawei advocates openness, collaboration, and shared success. Through joint innovation with our customers, partners, and peers, we are increasing the value of ICT in support of a more robust and mutually beneficial industry ecosystem. Our goal is a win-win situation for everyone, and we are dedicated to working together to establish mainstream standards and lay the foundations for this shared success.”

Bander Alfreih, Chairman & CEO of GAPP,said: “Integrated, collaborative partnerships like the one we have announced with Huawei are exactly what we need to move the region forward on the path to digital transformation. We are incredibly excited to get to work on building this infrastructure together, and to see how quickly it will produce tangible results for the ecosystem writ large, as well as the individual end customer. This will be how we define our success.”

Hazem Bazen, Vice President-Channel & Alliances, Huawei Enterprise Middle East: “Huawei is determined to build relationships that are both symbolic and practical with partners throughout the industry. Through a strategy of shared success, we will create together the platforms that will cultivate a fertile environment for an unrivalled digital ecosystem to grow.”

Huawei continues to establish a partner ecosystem that includes channel partners, solution partners, service partners, talent alliances, and investment and financing partners. Partners include many industry-leading companies such as SAP, Accenture, GE, Honeywell, Siemens, Alstom, Hexagon, Thales, VST ECS, Synnex, ALSO, and Redington. At the end of 2017, the company had more than 13,000 channel partners, 860 solution partners, and 2,900 service partners working around the world to deliver solutions to over 45,000 customers.

“Our focus during Leaders’ Summit 2018 is on understanding requirements and multiple dimensions in building the region’s digital economy. To see as to how such an economy would be made sustainable and equally so, how best telecom operators can play a decisive role in shaping up regional, digitally-enabled socio-economics. We are thrilled to get so many confirmations from both private and public sector leaders, wanting to be an active part of this year’s leaders’ congregation in Dubai. This year, I not only anticipate successful and goal-setting discussions at the Summit but also a much bigger representation of geographies from around the world,” stated Bocar BA, CEO & Board Member of SAMENA Council. 

“As ICT becomes a general purpose technology that improves lives of consumers and increases efficiency of businesses, ICT infrastructure becomes a key to unlocking economic growth and 5G is the main driver of this transformation,” said Charles Yang, President of Huawei Middle East. “Huawei is ushering in the 5G era by laying the groundwork for new networks, developing 5G commercial devices, and nurturing an ecosystem of telco organizations, vendors, and consumers prepared to seize new opportunities. The arrival of 5G will support national plans and accelerate digital transformation, and the SAMENA Council conference is a great occasion to gather ICT industry leaders to discuss challenges and opportunities on the road to 5G.”

Mr. Marwan Hayek, Chairman and CEO of Alfa said: “We are taking part in the SAMENA Council Leaders Summit after accomplishing the 1st 5G trial in Lebanon in April and achieving a record speed of 25 Gigabits/sec, the highest throughput in Lebanon’s history. We believe that this breakthrough is part of our commitment to be leading on the technology side as well as investing and mobilizing all our human capital and network assets to convey the human side of telco in all our operations and contribute to the happiness of the people”. Hayek added: “This gathering is an excellent opportunity to align with all SAMENA Council partners on how to move the ICT Industry further and explore ways on how we can build a future of telecom where humanity is in our core business and where we strive to improve lives and support economies and national development through technology”.

“Undoubtedly, SAMENA Council can be described as a unique platform for sharing knowledge, know-how and expertise in the ICT sector. It is a forum of collaboration, advocacy and communication. This annual gathering of Leaders’ Summit is a proof of success of what SAMENA Council is doing across the year. The organization of such conferences, seminars and workshops is so impactful. I’m honored, this year, to be elected member of SAMENA Council Board of Directors, which is a huge responsibility to be assumed by my Company to convey, with efficiency, the important messages of this Council” stated Mr. Tarig Hamza Zainelabdin, CEO of Sudatel.

Various regional leaders representing network operators, regulatory authorities, ICT service providers, global ICT leading agencies, and policy bodies from Asia and Europe have confirmed their participation in Leaders’ Summit 2018, including international bodies such as the ITU and GSMA.