BRANDING
ABU DHABI & DUBAI
ART ATTACK The Frank Gehry-desgined Guggenheim Museum will be just one of many iconic buildings on Saadiyat Island. Gehry himself has called the island vision “a cabinet of horrors”
THE EMIRATES HEAD TO HEAD DUBAI Sport The Dubai Sports City complex — budgeted at €2.7bn and 4,600,000m2 — is why the emirate believes it has a crack to host the 2020 Olympics. Its championship golf course is to be designed by Ernie Els. A takeover of Liverpool FC has been mooted for some time. Architecture The city’s most ambitious projects are being built not only upwards but also outwards, into the sea. Its artificial islands, the Palm Islands and The World, are created on miles of land reclaimed from the Gulf at a cost of about €19bn. Burj Dubai became the tallest building in the world in 2007 at 688m and is yet to reach its full height. Media Dubai Studio City is now headquarters to more than 70 broadcasters, while more than 160 TV channels operate from Dubai Media City. Tourism Dubai’s latest talking-point, Atlantis, opened in August: the 1,539-room hotel boasts a water park with an 11 million-litre lagoon and what is fancifully claimed to be the ruins of Atlantis. Transport Emirates airline has just had its first Airbus A380 delivered and another 57 remain on order to add to its €20bn fleet. Dubai also struck a €4.2bn deal to buy the ports and ferries group P&O. Culture The Art Dubai fair, which sets up its easels for the third year next March, is the largest event of its kind in the Middle East. Sotheby’s and Christie’s have opened Dubai offices, enticed not just by wealthy buyers but by the state’s zero import or export taxes for art.
ABU DHABI Sport Having bought 5% of the Ferrari Formula One team, Abu Dhabi will stage its first grand prix in November 2009. Sheikh Mansour Bin Zayed alNahyan, brother of the emirate’s ruler, bought UK Premier League club Manchester City in August and promptly broke the British transfer record by paying €41m for Brazilian striker Robinho. Architecture Work on the world’s first ‘zerocarbon city’, Masdar began this year. Harnessing the architectural talents of Norman Foster, construction is expected to take eight years and to cost in excess of €50bn. Media English-language newspaper The National was launched this year. The state-owned Abu Dhabi Media Co. is launching a film production arm, Imagenation, with eBay co-founder Jeff Skoll’s Participant Media, which will commit $1bn in financing over five years. Tourism The island’s cultural district will feature some of the world’s biggest names in art and architecture. Abu Dhabi is also completing a €173m expansion of its international airport with €4.6bn earmarked for various projects and development. Transport Etihad Airways recently announced the purchase of up to 95 Boeing wide-body jets and up to 110 Airbus planes. Culture Completion of the Abu Dhabi franchise of the Louvre, France’s most famous museum and gallery is scheduled for 2012. It will sit next to Abu Dhabi’s version of New York’s Guggenheim gallery.
Nouvel is designing a €300m branch of the Louvre. A 6,500-seat performing-arts centre, designed by the Iraqi-born, London-based architect Zaha Hadid, is also in the pipeline, as is its own symphony orchestra , while Sir Norman Foster is building a new national museum. Indeed there are so many signature buildings being constructed so close to each other on Saadiyat that even Gehry called the vision “a group grope… a cabinet of horrors”. Abu Dhabi has been targeting more mainstream but culturally symbolic investments. Last year, it created a €600m production fund with Warner Bros. In September, as Dubai announced preliminary details of its fourth film festival, to be held in December, the Abu Dhabi government announced it would pump more than $1bn into Hollywood film production over the next five years. And in a far larger exercise, fuelled as much by a desire for global respect as self-preservation, Hydra is involved in the €50bn carbonfree city Masdar – roughly a quarter of the amount the emirate is spending on infrastructure under the Plan Abu Dhabi 2030, instigated to help cope with the million more expatriate workers expected by this date. Dubai is spending €600bn on new infrastructure. Nevertheless, it is not culture but sport where the rivalry between the two emirates is the most intense. In August, just as Dubai International Capital (DIC) was expected to tie up an on-off deal to buy England’s Liverpool Football Club – and capitalise on the global popularity of the Premier League – Mansour bin Zayed Al Nahyan, the brother of Abu Dhabi’s ruler, swooped on Manchester City, a Cinderella team in the same division. The Manchester City deal, fronted by Hydra’s billionaire chief executive Sulaiman al-Fahim, is being presented as a financially astute investment. An 83-page document, A New Model for Partnership in Football, obtained by Arabian Business, outlines possible partnerships with multinational companies including India’s Tata and China Mobile. The document outlines a strategy to take the club to a global level, with rebranding that would see it move into financial services, fashion, retail, transport, communications, even fast food outlets. It says, perhaps a little fancifully, the brand must aim “to be the Virgin of Asia and the world”. It even features Virgin brands such as Virgin Atlantic as a comparison. But Dubai will not allow itself to be left behind. DIC is expected to complete its purchase of Liverpool – or underperforming Newcastle, or even Manchester United – while Dubai Sports City is talking up its sporting and training facilities for an Olympics tournament or football World Cup. The real contest has only just begun.
40 CNBC EUROPEAN BUSINESS I NOVEMBER 2008
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