An international report of MBA salaries has revealed that multinational employers of MBAs in Saudi Arabia pay $48,000 per annum on average.

Local MBA employers were reported to pay $36,000 per annum, around 33 percent less than multinational companies, the report showed.

The TopMBA.com Jobs and Salary Trends Report surveyed over 2000 MBA employers from 42 different countries.

The findings showed that the highest-earning MBAs in the Middle East were from the UAE, followed by Qatar and Saudi Arabia. 

Nunzio Quacquarelli, managing director of the QS World MBA Tour, the team behind the research, said: “Saudi Arabia saw a 21 percent increase in MBA hiring in 2011, lead by energy companies. The Middle East is expected to become a hot spot for MBA recruiting as economies such as Saudi, UAE, Qatar and Kuwait tries to steer their economies away from a dependency on oil towards becoming knowledge economies.”

Dr Abdulkader Alfantookh, vice minister of higher education in Saudi Arabia, said: “We are still in the early stages of becoming a knowledge economy, but Saudi Arabia is investing in scholarships for 40,000 students a year to study undergraduate, masters and MBA degrees overseas, and we expect them to bring their knowledge back to companies within Saudi Arabia.”

The report comes at a time where top business schools such as Boston University (US), IE Business School (Spain), Insead (France), and Manchester Business School (UK), will be in Riyadh with the QS World MBA Tour to recruit the country’s future business leaders to their campuses abroad.

Attendees of the event are eligible to apply for $1.2 million in scholarship funding from the QS Education Trust and from many business schools themselves. – TradeArabia News Service