Business

As Syria progressively moves towards a liberalized economy, necessity, nature, and promise of Business Intelligence, especially as applied to the Syrian economic and geostrategic context become apparent.

With Syria’s new environment empowering new players, innovative business concepts are beginning to emerge as possible responses to existing challenges that face all businesses entering this new market.
One prime example of such a challenge is a lack of the sort of comprehensive and reliable data investors need to clearly understand and enter the Syrian market. The unavailability
of such data hinders investors from pinpointing economic opportunities, and from developing business strategies that are both profitable to them and also contribute to the
economic development of Syria. The absence or poor quality of economic data is a major impediment to Syrian economic progress. Today as perhaps never before, all the assorted players should understand one fundamental truth: “accurate information is power!”
To these challenges, one particularly effective response does exist: Business Intelligence (BI). Today, BI offers a cutting-edge service that has proven useful to investors around the world.
The new industry of BI provides the following products: monitoring specific markets; collecting and standardizing business data; analyzing the data; and producing reliable reports that educate company executives about what they need to know in relation to a specific market or opportunity of interest.
The beauty of BI does not lie only in the elements specified above. There is a fifth and all-important factor:
forecasting. Forecasting empowers investors to predict future economic, political, and geostrategic conditions of the countries and industries that they propose to enter. Forecasting complements all the financial reports that investors need to decide whether
to embrace or drop an investment opportunity.
Forecasting, perhaps the most vital of all of the services that BI offers, cannot be restricted to the economic domain only. Rather, BI must include geopolitics, domestic and
international, otherwise probably best summarized under the rubric of geostrategy. Only objective, analytical geostrategic analyses, incorporating a variety of economic data but going well beyond the economic realm, can provide potential investors with the facts and probabilities that are critical to making responsible business decisions.
Some may argue that there have been success stories in the past for corporations that did not use BI. Others may claim that the Syrian market is not mature enough for such a
sophisticated service. The short answer to both arguments is that any past or present success story in business and investment surely did utilize the BI concept in one fashion or another.
Indeed, successful entrepreneurs may not have called it BI, or even realized that what they were doing was in fact BI. The point is that most prior successful ventures have not relied on high-quality, professional sources to collect and assess the information that they have required. Today, BI firms tune the services they provide to the specific needs of the corporations with which they contract, and offer them continuous, on-call market
monitoring services.
Few investors, especially foreign businessmen, will place significant funds in “problematic” regions threatened by political instability, war, or “terrorism.”
Today, Syria, as well as corporate and individual investors, is in need of BI more than ever. The emergence of BI comes as a natural response to the new era that Syria is
entering and will potentially provide an enormous stimulus to rational economic development.
One final point is relevant here. Since politics is inextricable from economics, BI, economic development, and international geostrategic influence should all be understood to constitute part of a single package. Without free trade, an increasingly open society,
and a rule of law, Syria will neither be able to compete effectively on the world stage nor will it be able to develop rapidly at home.
BI, permitted to operate in an untrammeled environment without fear or favor, will provide the hard and predictive data that all entrepreneurs require before making critical investment decisions. BI forecasting is perhaps one of the most important new industries of our time. Doing business in Syria is not an easy task, but it is a predictable one.
The science of Business Intelligence As Syria progressively moves towards a liberalized economy, necessity, nature, and promise of Business Intelligence, especially as applied to the Syrian economic and geostrategic context become apparent.

Syria is positioning itself to become a player in the Middle East’s lucrative sugar market, hoping that the opening of a new processing plant will allow it to cater to the region’s sweet tooth.

A $90m sugar refinery at Jindar in the province of Homs was opened on May 14, marking a new phase in the Syrian sugar industry. The plant is the irst major agriculture processing partnership between the Syrian private sector and international investors. Operating as the National Sugar Company, 51% of the refinery is held by Mohammed
Najib Assaf, the Syrian chairman of the company, while minority shareholders include US agribusiness giant Cargill and Brazilian sugar producer Crystalsev.
With an annual capacity of 1 million tons, which the partners say could be doubled in the future to meet regional export demands, the Jindar refinery is one of the largest of its kind in the world. Cargill will provide management and sales expertise for the project, while Crystalsev is to supply most of the raw material through bulk shipments of unprocessed sugar.
Amir Hosni Lutfi, Syria’s minister of economy and trade, said the plant would reduce reliance on expensive imports and would provide an opportunity for developing an export market. “The refinery’s high production capacity, which exceeds the demand of the Syrian market, will give us more strength and flexibility to compete with imported products,”
Lutfi said at the opening of the facility.
Cargill’s involvement in the project might raise some eyebrows, given Washington’s sanctions against Syria. However, its stake in the refinery does not fall within the terms of the executive order originally signed by President George W Bush in May 2004. While the sanctions prohibit the export of most products, with the notable exception of many food products and medicines, and restrict the export of any product that contains more than
10% of US-made components regardless of where produced, they do not actually stop a US firm from investing in Syria.
Indeed, bilateral trade between the US and Syria is on the increase, rising 7.7% last year to $472m, mainly driven by Syria’s need for grain.
According to Rateb Shallah, the chairman of the Damascus Chamber of Commerce, there is an increasing US interest in new projects in Syria. “Syria now has more business opportunities to offer and as such there is no way to ban or stop American businesspeople from participating in this process,” Shallah told local media on May 18.
National Sugar’s refinery marks another step in the industry’s move away from state control. The Syrian General Foreign Trade Organisation (GFTO), the body charged with overseeing public sector imports, has handed over the responsibility for the refinery’s sugar purchases to the company itself. This step was part of the program to open up the
economy, said Marwan al-Fawaz, GFTO’s chairman. “It makes more sense this way,” Fawaz told the press early this year.
“The company with the sugar refinery is now in charge of importing its needs of the raw product.”
With consumption estimated to be around 700,000 tons annually, Syria’s own producers are currently only able to meet a fraction of domestic requirements.
The country’s sugar beet production has also been hit by drought and disease, which have lowered harvests of many basic crops. Syria has thus become a major importer of both refined and raw sugar, purchasing a combined 650,000 tons annually. Last year 368,500 tons
came from Brazil alone, earning that country $111.7 million, according to the local press. Most of the imports come in the form of raw material, which is processed at a series of refineries located throughout the country.
While the new refinery may be good news for Syrians with a sweet tooth, it may not be as welcome for local sugar beet growers, processors and importers.
National Sugar’s chairman Assaf has promised the plant’s product will cost less than imported goods, though close to international prices. With the state looking to cut subsidies as part of its program to develop a market economy, local operators could face higher costs, making it even harder for them to compete.

A Syrian rags-to-riches story, Issam Anbouba talks to FW: about working his way to the top in the US and the UAE, and the factors and changes in the Syrian economic and investment environment that made him come back.

From a struggling petroleum-engineering student to a successful businessman: how did you pull this off?
Success depends on the decisions you take throughout your life. In my opinion, one of my first successful decisions was when I chose to go to the US to continue my education.

We heard a lot, in the past couple of years, about the need to separate ownership from management in order to substantially improve the ailing public sector. However, we have not heard the same talk about the private sector, which in my opinion is extremely important. Syria has committed itself to adopt the market economy and to put its bets on the private sector to become the main engine of economic growth. Everyone can see that the low of investments has picked up tremendously over the past six months and the demand for young Syrians to ill new jobs is increasing. We all know that the private sector is facing major challenges:

The textbook definition of Human Resource Management (HRM) is the set of organizational activities directed at attracting, developing and maintaining an effective workforce. In Syria, the study of HRM is slowly being introduced into educational curriculums, which will guarantee a steady influx of HR professionals who are proficient with the theories of HRM but unfortunately not necessarily the practice.

It’s no secret that we have entered the age of design, perhaps a little later than most of our neighbors. No one can deny, however, that design is a powerful force that manifests itself through branding, websites, exhibitions, and advertisements. This “design-force” is undoubtedly what is distinguishing one product from another. And it’s no secret that the attractive-ness and visual quality of any item is a key factor in determining its market-ability.

The average Syrian client: Identity?? The aspiring designer:

Yes sir, would you like us to create a distinctive image for your company that can differentiate it from the rest of your competitors?