Ajman Free Zone (AFZ) has revealed that a persistent focus in attracting new economy entrepreneurs spanning e-commerce and services across a global landscape resulted in robust inflow of investments into the free zone in 2017, significantly supporting its year-on-year growth strategy.

A statement by AFZ after an internal review of its business in 2017 said that it kept its growth pace in attracting investments and one of the most significant achievements in this year was the geographical diversity of investments into the free zone.

Faisal Al Nuaimi, executive director, sales and marketing, Ajman Free Zone, said: “Over and above the growth in absolute numbers, 2017 was a milestone year for two major reasons – one is a major diversification of investments as we tapped new source markets and second was our focus on the new economy, particularly across digital entrepreneurships and services industries.”

“What we did was to align our vision with the growing small and medium enterprise  (SME) segment world over positioning AFZ as an ideal vantage point for these businesses looking towards the Middle East and North Africa (Mena), Indian Sub-Continent and Africa,” he said.

“While we continue to maintain healthy investment continuity with our traditional source markets, our foray into new markets during 2017 helped us diversify our business outlook,” he added.

AFZ is also currently working on opening marketing hubs in Central and East Asian countries as well as Europe. In the second half of the year, AFZ did a roadshow in Italy to showcase its investment propositions to European investors.

Al Nuaimi continued: “Our keenness to tap investments from new markets was also complemented by new services. Coupled with this, we received continued patronage from our investors to our pioneering strategy based on offering flexible instalment based investment packages ideal for SMEs.”

AFZ also started corporate re-domiciliation services targeted at global offshore companies this year, said a statement.

“We have robust inquiries to this service we launched recently which we consider as an endorsement of the UAE as a business-friendly investment destination,” Al Nuaimi added.

Rishi Somaiya, sales director, AFZ, said:  “We were able to escalate our SME focus to many global markets with the help of our local offices present in many markets.”

“The fact that AFZ offers a low-investment, flexible investment option was a major catalyst in fuelling interest among global SMEs to consider moving to the free zone,” he added. – TradeArabia News Service