Mobile applications now take more than five per cent of the overall marketing budgets of Gulf-based companies across consumer industries, said an expert.

This is a significant development for the industry that is just a few years old in the Gulf, added Shadi Hasan, managing director, Flagship Projects, a leading Dubai-based hi-tech mobile and Web applications provider, at the recently concluded Click 5.0 Digital Marketing Conference in Dubai.

“The UAE has given a huge push to the popularity of the mobile Apps in the Arab world and this has paid off in the past one year. The penetration of these mobile applications is tremendous in the UAE,” Hasan said.

“The UAE is becoming a global player in mobile apps industry, thanks to its openness to the rest of the world economically and technologically.”

“We get new technologies in real time, as they are launched in USA, Europe and other advanced countries. Global ICT vendors have started looking at us as a very important market. This is because of the close cooperation between government and private sectors in developing this industry in the UAE,” Hasan continued.

“UAE has emerged as the re-exporter of technology to other parts of the region. I believe that this is due to awareness of the global companies to the role of Dubai as a springboard to disseminate their technologies or because of Dubai’s acknowledged position as the region’s most advanced city when it comes to adopting technology,” he added.

Hasan said that the huge advancement in mobile apps is still not fully exploited in the Arab region. He also referred to the need to address the critical issue of IPR to create a secure ambience for mobile phone applications developers to work and compete globally.

On technical perspective, Hasan said that Arabic content should be maximised in usage in mobile apps. He stressed that the digital gap between Arabic and English content should be bridged with urgently.

Flagship, the leading developer of mobile applications in the Middle East, commands 30 per cent of the professional mobile applications in the UAE market, and is poised to increase it further in the coming years, Hasan said. – TradeArabia News Service