As Samer Abu-Ltaif, the company’s president for the Middle East and Africa tells it, Microsoft measures its success in a bigger way: its impact to national economies, the millions of jobs it can potentially create and the way it enables a tech-savvy and ambitious population.
Microsoft’s most tangible benefit to the region, Abu-Ltaif says, will be through direct and indirect job creation. Clearly excited, he notes that research conducted by Microsoft and the International Data Corporation (IDC) concluded that Microsoft’s investment into large-scale data centres and the cloud – it’s “ecosystem” – has the potential to generate more than 520,000 jobs across key markets in the Middle East and Africa between 2017 and 2022.
“If you take the conversion that has been adopted by the World Bank that for every high-tech job, you can have 4.3 jobs in other occupations and other sectors, you’re talking about potentially Microsoft’s ecosystem leading to one million incremental jobs in MENA, and two million in the Middle East and all of Africa,” he says.
In this edition of Inside AB, Jeremy Lawrence and Bernd Debusmann look at the tech giant’s enormous impact on regional economies, and its work in helping prepare tech-savvy young people for the future.
(Source: Arabianbusiness.com YouTube channel)
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