A Dh600 million investment in brand Dubai

In the course of today's press conference announcing that Dubai will host elite sailing's Louis Vuitton Trophy this November, Sheikh Ahmed Bin Saeed Al Maktoum, the chairman and chief executive of Emirates Airline, dropped a very interesting number: Dh600 million. This figure, Emirates's Senior Vice President of Media Relations and Promotions  Boutrous Boutros later confirmed, is the airline 2010-2011 budget for sponsorship and events, and is roughly equivalent to the budget it had for the previous financial year.


It's nice to have a number to measure what has, up to now, largely been a list of superlatives. Emirates led the UAE into the world of sports sponsorship in the '80s and today remains a leader in sports sponsorship in the region, emblazoning its name on everything from Arsenal jerseys to the Melbourne Cup horse race. We have written about this until we were blue in the, er, fingers.

Today's announcement gives a glimpse of how this kind of investment can come back to the airline and its home emirate, with which its brand has always been so closely linked.  Emirates has been a loyal sponsor of Team New Zealand since 2003, helping the team perform what Grant Dalton, the team's chief executive, called a "rebuild" after some embarrassing America's Cup defeats. Emirates Team New Zealand sits on the board of the World Sailing Team Association -- the consortium of owners formed in the wake of the America's Cup's recent legal troubles to keep their teams in the water and competing. When the WSTA and its sponsor, Louis Vuitton, were deciding where to hold the four events for the 2010-2011 calendar, Dubai obviously had some pull.

As Yves Carcelle, the chairman of chief executive of Louis Vuitton, put it this morning: "It is clear that Dubai deserves an event of this category, given the support that the emirate has put behind sailing in the last few years."

More explicitly, Mr Grant described the decision to host the event in Dubai as "payback" for Emirates' support of the sport.

It's not clear whether this payback is to come in the form of direct tourism dollars or simply positive PR for Dubai's tourism industry, but the event's predecessor in Auckland gives a hint. Organizers of the 2009 Louis Vuitton Pacific Series reported that the 14-day festival injected US $12 million (Dh44 million) into the Auckland economy.