KDIPA Spotlight

Bloomberg

1 day ago

Transcript

00:00Our guests here today, Your Excellency Omar Saud Alamar, Minister of State for Communication Affairs of Kuwait,

00:07and Sheikh Abdullah Sabah Humoud al-Sabah, the Assistant Director General of Investment Operations at Kodipa.

00:17Salaam alaikum.

00:18Thank you so much for being here.

00:21I want to begin, Your Excellency, by asking you around the policies.

00:25I know that you've been working tirelessly in Kuwait to transform the economy, to diversify,

00:31and to create policies that are really going to underpin tech companies to thrive in the country.

00:40And I wanted to begin by saying, you know, we set the scene by saying that much of the time now, success means speed.

00:47So I wanted to ask you, how agile are the policies that you're creating that are really going to allow tech companies to thrive

00:55and to be successful in Kuwait?

00:58First of all, thank you, Nikki, for having us here.

01:00It will be very hard to follow a robot performance, but we'll try our best.

01:05And hopefully we can leave the stage better than the robot.

01:11Yes, Kuwait policies are built for agility and measurable impact.

01:16And we pride ourselves that to be flexible enough to meet the development of technology

01:28and the needs that require to push for Kuwait to be like a hub for the development.

01:38And of course, we engage with tech leaders and all interested parties to make sure our policies and regulation is agile enough.

01:54Yes.

01:54Public-private partnerships are really important for you in Kuwait.

01:59What do you see as your role in creating nationwide infrastructure that you've been developing,

02:05digital and physical infrastructure, in enabling the private sector to come in and be able to set up?

02:12How key are those PPPs for you?

02:14It is very important.

02:15We have a very successful engagement with the private sector in deploying the mobile networks,

02:25and we are one of the best in the world when it comes to quality coverage and the prices.

02:31As I said before, regulation do play a part that created this room for the private companies

02:40on the mobile operators to leverage this regulation in a proper manner where we are in, I would say, one of the best in the world.

02:52Now, for the other parts of infrastructure like FIX and others, yes, we are at the moment creating this public-private company

03:03that will handle the continuous rollout of fiber optics and to meet all the technological requirements and needs, inshallah.

03:19I think you'll be a modest, Your Excellency.

03:21I think one thing that people may not know about Kuwait is the youthful population and the connectivity of that youthful population.

03:29And I think that's an incredible feat.

03:30You know, 99.7% of the population is online.

03:33Yes, and that's created by, today, by wireless connectivity mostly, and hopefully, very soon, we'll meet that with the fixed infrastructure.

03:43We have a huge demand coming up, as you stated, with the private sector, especially today, we have Google and Microsoft

03:54that they will establish their regions in Kuwait, and that would require high demand on the connectivity part,

04:03plus the infrastructure overall.

04:07That youthful population is going to be an incredible workforce of the future, as well as being the end users for tech companies.

04:15Sheikh Abdullah, if I may ask you, how do you see nurturing that youthful population

04:19and to ensure that they are going to be the pipeline of the future workforce for private tech companies that are coming to Kuwait?

04:27I think youth present the most powerful asset in Kuwait,

04:33and with 68% of our population under the age of 35.

04:38And they are, we are a home of one of the youngest, most connected digitalists in the region.

04:50They, this generation did not only use the technology, they create, they innovate, and they build solution to address our time challenges.

05:03Partnership with global leading, as has Xansi mentioned, technological company like Google and Microsoft

05:11to prepare our workforce in an AI-driven economy, where we need to build people that is ready to not only use the technology to train,

05:31to make them ready for a cybersecurity, digital or data analytics, and so on.

05:38And this is an opportunity for international investors to get engaged with a ready-made talent pool in that country.

05:47And before we wrap, I would just like to ask you, Your Excellency, policy and regulation is going to be key.

05:52We see cybersecurity as a growing risk.

05:56It's moving up the ranks all the time of the global risk reports.

05:59How important is it for you as the government to ensure that the policy and regulation that's going to underpin global cybersecurity

06:06is not being thought of as something afterwards, it's actually being built into the system from the get-go?

06:12Yes. As we modernize our infrastructure, it's very important to understand that it has to be robust, scalable,

06:21and of course, cybersecurity is one of the most important things that we have to take care of.

06:26So we have a government body that is today looking after these policies and regulation,

06:35and these policies and regulation should not hinder any development coming in the future.

06:40It is flexible enough to make sure our infrastructure is secure, connectivity is secure,

06:46and of course, our citizens' privacy, and whatever is related to these types of risk.

06:56Yes, they are on the rise, but at the same time, to have to make sure we have the proper tools

07:01and the skilled people to take care of that.

07:07Well, unfortunately, we're going to have to leave it there, but we'll continue the conversation over lunch.

07:11We just started.

07:12I know, I know, but look, we're late already.

07:14Your Excellency Sheikha Vdala, it's been an absolute pleasure.

07:19Thank you very much.

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