Wednesday, July 28, 2004

Dubai's new export: the Internet City

Dubai is taking : "its development record one step further: It is exporting its experience.
What's being taken abroad to countries such as India, Pakistan, Iran, Malta, New Zealand, South Africa and Central Asian nations, is the concept of the 'Internet City'. In deals signed recently by Dubai with some of these countries, large campuses will be built to house some of the world's best-known technology brands - such as Microsoft, Oracle, Hewlett-Packard, Dell, Siemens, IBM, Logica, Canon, Cisco, Sun Microsystems and Sony.
The central objective of the Internet City is to establish tax-free economic zones. In Dubai, for example, foreign companies together employ nearly 20,000 people from 185 countries on a bucolic campus. Together, they constitute the world's largest IT tax-free zone, from which they re- export their information and communications technology. Their location in Dubai enables them to target a regional population of 1.8 billion people in some 50 countries with a combined gross domestic product of US$1.6 trillion (S$2.8 trillion)."

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