Almost 60 per cent of technology start-up founders in the Middle East and North Africa are expected to exit their companies in five years, according to a joint report by technology platform Magnitt and venture capital firm 500 Startups.
Fifty-nine per cent of start-ups said they were "certain" that they will create a company with an exit value of $100 million, according to the State of MENA Startups 2019 report released on Wednesday.
“Tech-enabled companies in the region [are] maturing rapidly and attracting global and regional attention from would-be acquirers,” it added.
Companies from the UAE, the Arab world's second-largest economy, account for about 40 per cent of the top exits made by entrepreneurs in the region, according to a Google-commissioned report released in February.
Ride-hailing service Careem’s $3.1 billion acquisition by Uber was the first unicorn exit — a privately-owned company achieving a valuation of over $1bn — in the region. That deal followed Amazon’s acquisition of e-commerce firm Souq in 2017 for $580m.
In 2012, the finance and industry news portal Zawya was sold to Reuters for a reported $40m, while in 2009, Yahoo, then the second-most popular internet search engine, bought Maktoob.com for about $165m.
The report is based on a survey of more than 100 company founders from 12 countries, who have raised about $114m between them. Most (86 per cent) of these were still in the early pre-seed or seed capital funding stages and took seven months on average to complete their last fund-raising. Nearly seven in ten start-ups approached up to ten investors to raise their most recent funding, it added.
Hiring the right talent in Mena has also proved an uphill task, with nearly 62 per cent of the respondents admitting it was “one of the major challenges” in their entrepreneurial journey. Regional start-ups faced two major roadblocks to hiring quality people — “lack of specialised skills” in some sectors and the “inability to compete on salaries”, said the report.
Scaling business is the major focus of start-ups. More than 80 per cent of the founders focused on optimising for growth over profitability, according to the report’s findings. Eighty-four per cent of start-ups have in-house tech teams to diversify their products and services.
“This report really digs into the start-up founder’s journey and the challenges they are facing. We hope this acts as an eye-opener to any decision-maker and becomes a basis for future studies in this space,” said Philip Bahoshy, founder of Magnitt.
Silicon Valley’s 500 Startups, which has a Mena investment team, has been the most active venture capital firm in the region, according to the report. It has invested in more than 100 regional start-ups in the last two years.
Starring: Sam Worthington, Sigourney Weaver, Zoe Saldana
Rating: 4.5/5
The Florida Project
Director: Sean Baker
Starring: Bria Vinaite, Brooklynn Prince, Willem Dafoe
Four stars
The specs
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Three ways to boost your credit score
Marwan Lutfi says the core fundamentals that drive better payment behaviour and can improve your credit score are:
1. Make sure you make your payments on time;
2. Limit the number of products you borrow on: the more loans and credit cards you have, the more it will affect your credit score;
3. Don't max out all your debts: how much you maximise those credit facilities will have an impact. If you have five credit cards and utilise 90 per cent of that credit, it will negatively affect your score.
Tottenham Hotspur 3 (Son 1', Kane 8' & 16') West Ham United 3 (Balbuena 82', Sanchez og 85', Lanzini 90' 4)
Man of the match Harry Kane
THE SPECS
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Paltan
Producer: JP Films, Zee Studios Director: JP Dutta Cast: Jackie Shroff, Sonu Sood, Arjun Rampal, Siddhanth Kapoor, Luv Sinha and Harshvardhan Rane Rating: 2/5
Indoor cricket in a nutshell
Indoor Cricket World Cup - Sep 16-20, Insportz, Dubai
16 Indoor cricket matches are 16 overs per side
8 There are eight players per team
9 There have been nine Indoor Cricket World Cups for men. Australia have won every one.
5 Five runs are deducted from the score when a wickets falls
4 Batsmen bat in pairs, facing four overs per partnership
Scoring In indoor cricket, runs are scored by way of both physical and bonus runs. Physical runs are scored by both batsmen completing a run from one crease to the other. Bonus runs are scored when the ball hits a net in different zones, but only when at least one physical run is score.
Zones
A Front net, behind the striker and wicketkeeper: 0 runs
B Side nets, between the striker and halfway down the pitch: 1 run
C Side nets between halfway and the bowlers end: 2 runs
D Back net: 4 runs on the bounce, 6 runs on the full
The bio
Favourite book: Peter Rabbit. I used to read it to my three children and still read it myself. If I am feeling down it brings back good memories.
Best thing about your job: Getting to help people. My mum always told me never to pass up an opportunity to do a good deed.
Best part of life in the UAE: The weather. The constant sunshine is amazing and there is always something to do, you have so many options when it comes to how to spend your day.
Favourite holiday destination: Malaysia. I went there for my honeymoon and ended up volunteering to teach local children for a few hours each day. It is such a special place and I plan to retire there one day.
Scoreline
Switzerland 5
Three tips from La Perle's performers
1 The kind of water athletes drink is important. Gwilym Hooson, a 28-year-old British performer who is currently recovering from knee surgery, found that out when the company was still in Studio City, training for 12 hours a day. “The physio team was like: ‘Why is everyone getting cramps?’ And then they realised we had to add salt and sugar to the water,” he says.
2 A little chocolate is a good thing. “It’s emergency energy,” says Craig Paul Smith, La Perle’s head coach and former Cirque du Soleil performer, gesturing to an almost-empty open box of mini chocolate bars on his desk backstage.
3 Take chances, says Young, who has worked all over the world, including most recently at Dragone’s show in China. “Every time we go out of our comfort zone, we learn a lot about ourselves,” she says.
