Opportunity Dubai, four months a No1 UK bestseller

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For almost four months ‘Opportunity Dubai’ has been sat in the No1 position of the Daily Telegraph’s Business Book Club which perhaps shows that while Dubai may have its far share of critics in the press these days many people are still fascinated by the place.

Dubai is of course now a very different business proposition to when ‘Opportunity Dubai’ was delivered to the publisher in mid-2008. The book completely avoids the global economic downturn that only hit Dubai in September last year.

Pre-gloom boom

It can therefore be excused for painting a generally rosy picture of the city and its unique culture of opportunity for business entrepreneurs. However, this begs the question whether such opportunities still exist.

Yet about half of the ‘Opportunity Dubai’ story is about the Internet website AME Info and its development from the ashes of the dot-com crash in 2000 which was every bit as devastating to dot-com companies as the present global economic crisis is to many businesses.

Indeed, Dr. Marc Faber suggests that setting up a business in a recession is a good idea because if you can make it work then it will be bound to be very successful in the good times. A nice theory, rather tougher in practice.

But it can be done. AME Info started from a $49.99 software package and ended up being sold for $27 million. Could there be businesses starting up now in Dubai that achieve something similar?

Lessons learnt

Why not? But anybody thinking of doing this could do with getting hold of a copy of ‘Opportunity Dubai’ and learning from the lessons of AME Info, rather than repeating some of the more obvious mistakes.

The open business culture of Dubai is still there. Rule No1 on the Dubai Media City’s Business Centre mission statement is ‘No Bureaucracy’ and Dubai likes to leave its entrepreneurs to get on with their business.

There is also no income or capital gains tax to consider, so hours are saved from tax planning and form filling. You simply have to come up with a workable business model in the worst global economic downturn since the 1930s. Sorry, that might be less easy.

# ‘Opportunity Dubai’ is available in all branches of Spinney’s supermarket, Magrudy’s, Dubai Duty Free, Amazon.co.uk and many other bookstores.