Global Business at a Crossroads Opportunities & Risks In Partnership with FAB

Great. Thank you very much. It's wonderful to be here. The IF has been a permanent part of this wonderful country for over 10 years and we've been a part and had a front row seat to the growth story. A growth story that we heard this morning is booming and dynamic and resilient and we certainly need those qualities this year.

A year in which markets have become very tumultuous and earlier this year global economy hit an air pocket. The assumption was that we'd end the year in a much more negative position than we are now. But in fact, we haven't. We've outperformed all expectations. The reason for that is because the global economy is rewiring itself.

People like you in the audience got on airplanes. You went to new destinations. You found new suppliers, new alliances, new partners. Capital will always find a way. But capital is a coward.

It goes where it's treated well and flees where it's treated badly. Fortunately, how capital is treated incredibly well here in the UAE in Abu Dhabi. And it does so because of the enormous advanced infrastructure, the human capital and also the technological innovation that's occurring here at a brenic pace. But it's not only just about a single economy. It's a multiple dimension economy, an economy that is growing more diversified by the day as we witnessed by just some of the key leaders here on the stage.

So why don't we get started discuss the background to this global approach as well as two of the leading industrialists and technologists here in Abu Dhabi. Amanda why don't we start with you uh Monday is uh is one of the great uh pro is one of the great uh asset management firms globally. You have a global perspective. Why don't you set the stage for us as you see the world as you come here for a few days. What global vision do you bring and what lessons have you learned from this year?

Thank you very much team. Um first of all I wanted to say just one word.

You could pull the mic.

Is it okay? Can you hear me? Yeah. Perfect. So um first of all I wanted to say thrilled I am to be here this morning to say one word about Amundi that some of you may not know.

We're managing $2.6 trillion dollar around the world. Um we have more than 800 investment professionals and we're really happy to work and partner with uh very uh important institutions in the UAE. To answer your your question, um I think that global growth will moderate in 2026 mostly because of the US. We know that consumption is slowing.

We know of course that labor markets slowing as well. Um Europe growth should pick up in 27 from 0.9 to 1.3%. And the emerging markets will uh decelerate as well but uh will grow much faster than developed markets.

So we will invest in emerging markets in the future. Inflation will be complex uh probably especially in the US. And just to um tell you a quick word about how we advise our clients to invest in 2026. I think the key word is going to be diversification. Uh diversification uh on the fixed income side, less US bond, more European bonds, European credit and emerging bonds.

Diversification above all on the equity sides uh because the market is overvalued and also uh obviously uh overconentrated um and diversification in gold currencies and in private assets mostly in European private debt and infrastructure.

Wonderful. Thank you. Well, let's turn to some of our local leading industrialist business leaders. Sia 2.0 zero.

Uh you've had an astounding career here is you've done just about everything. Why don't you tell us about from your from investor perspective how do these global shifts affect you your entity and diversification?

Here's a question. I'm sorry for I can't hear you

given the global uh issues we just raised. Tell us about your business and how that's been affected by this goal for diversification.

Okay. So 2.0 Zero is one of the largest listed companies on the Abu Dhabi stock exchange. We operate and invest in two sectors, energy and consumer. And these two sectors are really mega themes for the next 10 years where trillions of dollars are being invested and they offer a lot of opportunities for us.

If we talk about so being based in Abu Dhabi uh we are a 100 billion plus or minus company listed on the Abu Dhabi stock exchange with 50 operating entities in our portfolio. The global opportunities for our portfolio companies are both in energy and in mining. In energy across the supply chain, be it in mining, in energy infrastructure, renewable governments have committed uh have underestimated the cost and the time that it would require to reach their net zerocarbon emission. And there are $44 trillion expected to be invested for the next 10 years. And that's a huge opportunity by itself.

We are currently in Africa and in India making the most out of that. On the consumer sector, opportunities are really global. Uh you see $2.4 trillion dollar being added to the consumer spent every year. Uh but our job as a consumer focused group is to take the most we can from that spent.

Now who is spending that money and where is this money spent? We find that 80% of the money is spent in Asia which is a huge area of opportunity for us globally but also people are a hundred million people every year are joining the middle class. That's 1 billion people for the next 10 years and that's an opportunity right there for our companies to serve them in our consumer sector. And is that are you broadening your diversification into a number of new markets or do you growing more deeply in the markets you were in or both?

Both.

You can't are are you growing more broadly in new markets? You mentioned Indian Africa. Are you growing more deeply into the markets that you're already in?

Oh yes. Right now we're in 85 countries. That's largely due to our consumer and retail base. In Africa we're in Zambia and we're in Congo for mining copper and tin. We're in Egypt for energy infrastructure manufacturing.

We're in India on renewables. We're largely in Europe for apparel and retail. And we're market leaders in our region in the UAE and in Saudi on media and beauty and mobility.

Wonder you have relaunched, renamed uh Ian a wonderful name. You're now a a global hub for technology for communications. tell us about your relaunch and what this means in terms of diversification.

Okay, so I think this what we have managed to do is a real successful backbone in the UEE. So the UEE now we have the most connected fiber network in the world. 99.8% of all households and all businesses are connected by fiber. This is the best in the world.

We also managed in the last four years to have the fastest mobile networks in the world. So we said you know we're doing something really well and we want to go be beyond emerging markets. So we had investments in Africa, we had investments in Asia and we said we are so good that we can take that also to some of the developed markets. So we've moved now to Eastern Europe and for the past 18 months we've seen real good success as not only we continue to grow there but we started also building the elements that created the success here. So adding for example fiber networks which we just acquired in Serbia looking into how we can complement the business.

In addition to this there is a layer of technology that we're adding. So we started with our DNA being in telecoms and connectivity but what we have done is we've said we'll go to all the adjacencies that are serving and benefiting from this telecom background.

Right?

So we are in fintech we are in entertainment. So we have Ian Money, we have digital banks in several of our markets. We have uh Stars which is the biggest uh let's say uh Middle Eastbased entertainment platform uh that has international uh uh content. There's also of course uh another one NBC Shahed in Saudi. So the two are the big poles of entertainment in the region.

We also are an enterprise in many techn technological aspects. So we are in cyber security, we are in cloud of course we are part of the AI move

and this enables us as a company to do more go further and at the same time it enables a lot of businesses here and across our footprint to also catch up with the technology and be able to compete on a global level and talking about global diversification we have learned I think across the way that it's not very easy there are countries that are very easy to do business. Here the UEA I think is a great example where it's super easy to introduce a new line of business or come into the business. There are other places where it's much harder. The EU took us a long time until we managed to complete the process of our investment there and be able to uh be in Europe. We've seen also uh as we progress in several other countries huge variation about the ease of doing business.

So I think this is still a big barrier but we see the benefits of this diversification because you get market size in in this global economy where we see a lot of geopolitics impact as well and lots of currency impact having enough diversification really gives us a buffer from these big moves that can happen in some market but then the stability in other places uh gets us an overall growing but robust results.

Wonderful. Valley. Uh there's an ocean of capital flushing around all around the world every day looking for returns, looking for safe harbor. What is it about the UAE generally in Abu Dhabi specifically that you think is attractive to capital because there's certainly a tremendous amount of capital that's flowing in to this country and this city. What is it about this place that is attractive to capital?

Well, I think the the macro uh economics fundamentals are very good actually. Um we can see a robust growth. Uh the some surplus of course uh on the fiscal side and the external sides. Uh the deficit um is the public debt is very low. We have low inflation in this region.

And last but not least, we have political stability. So for all these reason the the the region is extremely attractive. Um the development of infrastructures uh and of course of the financial center. We can see that today uh is also very positive. It has boosted the capital markets.

So when we look at the figures uh inflows have been last year very sizable and diversified uh 46 billion uh exactly uh it's the region largest first but it's also the second largest in the world just after Brazil but before India or Indonesia. So I think this is a lot of good news for the future.

It is indeed good news. So yeah, uh technology is an important part of every business leader's daily 247. How do you allocate scarce resources? You're an investor in technology. How do you manage the need for investing constantly investing the latest and greatest with just fiscal stability, financial stability?

How do you make that trade-off as an industry leader? I think we can I think we can divide companies who invest in AI and tech in two categories. Those who are investing in infrastructure who really have to spend trillions of dollar and be very disciplined but also those who use the AI tools. We are the latter. We are a company that uses AI tools in order to optimize our current performance.

And these AI tools first of all are not expensive. Second of all, the return on investment on those tools is exponential. Today in 2.0, we have deployed, we have partnered with a lot of companies um Aaria G40 to in order to create the best tools for us. We have around 5,000 agents deployed that gives us uh that give us live feedback on the performance of our 50 subsidiaries across the world.

I have a dashboard with all the financial metrics that matter where I get immediate feedback on what is happening in the country. We have uh we've invested around $10 million this year which is nothing compared to our size minus the hiring. We have partnerships with the Muhammad bin Zed AI University one of its kind in the world based here in Abu Dhabi. And with all of that, we have been uh able to see a 7 to 30% EBTA uplift across our sector. Some sectors are easier than the other.

And I'd like to add that being in Abu Dhabi, one of the most one of your questions to me was what were the benefits of being listed in Abu Dhabi, right? and easy access to infrastructure and to AI is something that will help us really which is my objective outperform everybody else in the region and that's very important so I will not I always encourage CEOs to continue investing some of the tools will work some will not work but eventually the the returns are much higher

patina I'm ask you the same question you're in the capital formation business you're hardware software physical capital how do you make the trade-off up and let me ask a question. I talked to a lot of CEOs around the world and I asked the question are you getting a positive ROI in your investment especially on artificial intelligence and usually the answer is there's a pause and there's I think so but I don't know. How do you approach the amount of capital you have to deploy with the uncertainty of the potential return? Look, I think this is I think the the the most haunting question we always have is capital allocation is how much of the capital goes in the different buckets and what we have done in recent years. We have of course continued to invest on the infrastructure on the backbone because that enables everything and still this is the biggest generator of profit for us.

So the ROI this keeps ROI positive. However, what we have done is we've taken part of that capital allocation and invested in cloud businesses and in AI and we have yet to see the returns coming but they are on the horizon. We can see them h and I think as Samia said there is a lot of deployment now of AI agents. We're moving a lot of the services for example in customer care and retail. We have opened two fully autonomous stores today that are functional that customers can go and do the entire purchase without any human intervention.

And that's talking from buying a a communication plan to buying an iPhone to buying accessories without any human being present. It's all fully interactive with screens and robots moving around and making it a very very pleasant experience. And probably we are going to expand this to more and more stores over time. And this is fully AI based and it's a first in the world

right

and in customer care like many other uh companies we are deploying a lot of AI in the network optimization and energy which is also becoming something essential. There's a loss of deployment of AI to optimize the energy use. So do we see a clear return today? No. But do we see a clear return that will happen over the next 2 3 4 years?

Absolutely. And we are investing for it. And in addition to this, we have formed as part of our company a venture fund that has been investing in AI related businesses as well. And we see some of these companies have already over the last three years since we started have already grown so much in valuation that we know we'll also get very positive return from some of these companies being successful.

Wonderful. Well, ladies and gentlemen, you've heard the reasons why capital comes here from around the world, why it stays here, and why it's sticky. You've heard from two of the great industry leaders here why it's deployed in such a successful way. Please give them a round of applause. Thank you very much.