The Dubai Shopping Festival (DSF) created mixed fortunes for retailers this year, having been forecast to provide a huge financial fillip to stores across the emirate.
A steady flow of free-spending tourists helped buoy electronics retailers at the annual shopping event, but other stores reported financial and shopping fatigue among customers as the DSF followed a busy festive period.
"Bringing it forward did not really help," said Vipen Sethi, the chief executive of Landmark Group, one of the biggest retailers in the Middle East, representing local brands such as Centrepoint, Home Centre, Shoe Mart, Emax and Candelite, as well as Oasis Mall.
"Saying that, there are a lot of people experiencing the festival because they were here on holiday, but it did not convert to numbers."
The start of festival, which finishes today, was moved forward from January 20 last year to January 5 this year, beginning just after the New Year, festive and Eid periods.
Mr Sethi said Landmark had enjoyed a slight increase in sales, but nothing "exceptional".
"The festival came a little bit early," he said. "It was quite busy in the tourism sense, so people bought and that helped."
Mohi Din BinHendi, the president of BinHendi Enterprises, a luxury and food and beverage conglomerate, said the DSF was beneficial for Dubai as it attracted visitors from all over the Gulf.
"Everything you do cannot benefit everybody, but if it benefits Dubai, it benefits me," he said.
Total additional retail, travel and hospitality spending in the Dubai economy as a result of the DSF was forecast this year to eclipse last year's figure of Dh15.1 billion (US$4.11bn), according to the Dubai Events and Promotions Establishment.
Electronics and gadgets retailers said they had experienced a strong DSF as the combination of product launches and tourists boosted sales.
"We are in an industry where the products keep coming in," said Ashish Panjabi, the chief operating officer for Jacky's Electronics. "Certain products have done extremely well, the iPhone 4S, the BlackBerry Porsche and the Sony Tablet. These are products that came in just before DSF."
Amit Malani, the president of Harman Middle East, said the DSF had been "fantastic" and reported a 30 per cent increase in sales this year compared with last year's event.
"We had a pretty good DSF," Mr Malani said. "At the beginning of the festival there were a lot of Russians in town and people buying."
He said sales of portable products, such as tablets and smartphones, had been strong because tourists could take them home.
Hoteliers echoed Mr Malani's comments about the month-long festival. "DSF was really great," said Wael El Behi, the executive assistant manager of the Ramada Downtown Dubai. "The whole month of January was excellent; not only for us but for the whole destination."
The hotel achieved an average occupancy of 94 per cent last month, with revenues up about 65 per cent compared with January last year, he said. School holidays in Saudi Arabia at the end of the month helped to bring in more business from the kingdom, he said.
Many tourists from the traditional source markets of Russia and Germany have visited Dubai over the past few weeks, while there was an increase in guests from South America, including Argentina, at the Ramada, Mr El Behi noted.
"They're coming for the shopping, as well as the weather conditions," he said. "Plus we have to admit the fact that the instability in [some] other Arab countries [positively] impacted the business here. Rates were higher than last year."
Kempinski Hotel Mall of the Emirates, which is connected to the mall, said business was strong during the festival.
"This is a key period for our property and this year was even better than the last," Kempinski said. "Not only did we see an increase on occupancy over last year, but we also achieved an increase of 20 per cent on our average rate compared to the same period in 2011."
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NO OTHER LAND
Director: Basel Adra, Yuval Abraham, Rachel Szor, Hamdan Ballal
Stars: Basel Adra, Yuval Abraham
Rating: 3.5/5
The Birkin bag is made by Hermès.
It is named after actress and singer Jane Birkin
Noone from Hermès will go on record to say how much a new Birkin costs, how long one would have to wait to get one, and how many bags are actually made each year.
Brief scores:
Day 2
England: 277 & 19-0
West Indies: 154
Attacks on Egypt’s long rooted Copts
Egypt’s Copts belong to one of the world’s oldest Christian communities, with Mark the Evangelist credited with founding their church around 300 AD. Orthodox Christians account for the overwhelming majority of Christians in Egypt, with the rest mainly made up of Greek Orthodox, Catholics and Anglicans.
The community accounts for some 10 per cent of Egypt’s 100 million people, with the largest concentrations of Christians found in Cairo, Alexandria and the provinces of Minya and Assiut south of Cairo.
Egypt’s Christians have had a somewhat turbulent history in the Muslim majority Arab nation, with the community occasionally suffering outright persecution but generally living in peace with their Muslim compatriots. But radical Muslims who have first emerged in the 1970s have whipped up anti-Christian sentiments, something that has, in turn, led to an upsurge in attacks against their places of worship, church-linked facilities as well as their businesses and homes.
More recently, ISIS has vowed to go after the Christians, claiming responsibility for a series of attacks against churches packed with worshippers starting December 2016.
The discrimination many Christians complain about and the shift towards religious conservatism by many Egyptian Muslims over the last 50 years have forced hundreds of thousands of Christians to migrate, starting new lives in growing communities in places as far afield as Australia, Canada and the United States.
Here is a look at major attacks against Egypt's Coptic Christians in recent years:
November 2: Masked gunmen riding pickup trucks opened fire on three buses carrying pilgrims to the remote desert monastery of St. Samuel the Confessor south of Cairo, killing 7 and wounding about 20. IS claimed responsibility for the attack.
May 26, 2017: Masked militants riding in three all-terrain cars open fire on a bus carrying pilgrims on their way to the Monastery of St. Samuel the Confessor, killing 29 and wounding 22. ISIS claimed responsibility for the attack.
April 2017: Twin attacks by suicide bombers hit churches in the coastal city of Alexandria and the Nile Delta city of Tanta. At least 43 people are killed and scores of worshippers injured in the Palm Sunday attack, which narrowly missed a ceremony presided over by Pope Tawadros II, spiritual leader of Egypt Orthodox Copts, in Alexandria's St. Mark's Cathedral. ISIS claimed responsibility for the attacks.
February 2017: Hundreds of Egyptian Christians flee their homes in the northern part of the Sinai Peninsula, fearing attacks by ISIS. The group's North Sinai affiliate had killed at least seven Coptic Christians in the restive peninsula in less than a month.
December 2016: A bombing at a chapel adjacent to Egypt's main Coptic Christian cathedral in Cairo kills 30 people and wounds dozens during Sunday Mass in one of the deadliest attacks carried out against the religious minority in recent memory. ISIS claimed responsibility.
July 2016: Pope Tawadros II says that since 2013 there were 37 sectarian attacks on Christians in Egypt, nearly one incident a month. A Muslim mob stabs to death a 27-year-old Coptic Christian man, Fam Khalaf, in the central city of Minya over a personal feud.
May 2016: A Muslim mob ransacks and torches seven Christian homes in Minya after rumours spread that a Christian man had an affair with a Muslim woman. The elderly mother of the Christian man was stripped naked and dragged through a street by the mob.
New Year's Eve 2011: A bomb explodes in a Coptic Christian church in Alexandria as worshippers leave after a midnight mass, killing more than 20 people.
U19 WORLD CUP, WEST INDIES
UAE group fixtures (all in St Kitts)
- Saturday 15 January: UAE beat Canada by 49 runs
- Thursday 20 January: v England
- Saturday 22 January: v Bangladesh
UAE squad:
Alishan Sharafu (captain), Shival Bawa, Jash Giyanani, Sailles
Jaishankar, Nilansh Keswani, Aayan Khan, Punya Mehra, Ali Naseer, Ronak Panoly,
Dhruv Parashar, Vinayak Raghavan, Soorya Sathish, Aryansh Sharma, Adithya
Shetty, Kai Smith
ELIO
Starring: Yonas Kibreab, Zoe Saldana, Brad Garrett
Directors: Madeline Sharafian, Domee Shi, Adrian Molina
Rating: 4/5
Wicked: For Good
Director: Jon M Chu
Starring: Ariana Grande, Cynthia Erivo, Jonathan Bailey, Jeff Goldblum, Michelle Yeoh, Ethan Slater
Rating: 4/5
Third Test
Day 3, stumps
India 443-7 (d) & 54-5 (27 ov)
Australia 151
India lead by 346 runs with 5 wickets remaining
More from Rashmee Roshan Lall
Despacito's dominance in numbers
Released: 2017
Peak chart position: No.1 in more than 47 countries, including the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia and Lebanon
Views: 5.3 billion on YouTube
Sales: With 10 million downloads in the US, Despacito became the first Latin single to receive Diamond sales certification
Streams: 1.3 billion combined audio and video by the end of 2017, making it the biggest digital hit of the year.
Awards: 17, including Record of the Year at last year’s prestigious Latin Grammy Awards, as well as five Billboard Music Awards
A list of the animal rescue organisations in the UAE
Brief scores:
Liverpool 3
Mane 24', Shaqiri 73', 80'
Manchester United 1
Lingard 33'
Man of the Match: Fabinho (Liverpool)
