Mahmood Al Bastaki

CEO, Dubai Trade

What was your greatest challenge in 2016 and how did you overcome it?
We anticipated the depressed global economic outlook and took measures to diversify our revenue streams through new customer acquisitions for our flagship products – Dubai Trade Portal Framework and Rosoom. We continued to look for innovative ways to address the needs of our customers and by adopting new technologies to improve our service offering.

What do you predict will be the key trends and events that will shape the regional logistics industry in 2017?
2017 will be another important year for global and regional logistics industries. Based on multiple expert opinions we are predicting continued macro-economic headwinds for the first half of 2017 with cautious optimism for the second half of 2017. We see this as an opportunity to be ready for another uplift in regional logistics services and are actively developing new platforms in transportation and warehousing for the benefit of our customers. We believe in working responsibly and sustainably to build a strong business for our customers, people and society.

With this long-term approach, we also embrace technology in our everyday operations and the recent government announcement regarding BlockChain technology is a key focus area for us. BlockChain is a new and highly-secure way of online transactions. It works on the concept of a distributed ledger of database transactions with low-cost and low-latency. This makes BlockChain suitable for the recording of events such as container movements and other records management activities, customer identity management and proving provenance. We have already demonstrated a proof-of-concept for BlockChain in trade facilitation at the last GITEX event in October this year. We will continue to work with government leaders, technology providers and customers to pioneer the innovative use of BlockChain technology for cross-border trade and logistics operations.

What will be Dubai Trade’s big news next year?
2017 will be another important and crucial year for us as we launch our global operations. We have been invited to establish a similar electronic trade facilitation portal in many countries around the world and we will be making announcements regarding these developments in the first half. We’ve also set up a subsidiary company called DT World through which we will offer our expertise and products to other countries. This will have a positive impact on local trade too, as exports from one country could trigger the necessary import transactions here in Dubai and the UAE and vice-versa.