Nigeria s elections promise a genuine contest – but avoiding unrest is vital – The Sierra Leone Telegraph thesierraleonetelegraph.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from thesierraleonetelegraph.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
May 5, 2021
In October 2019, when Saudi Arabia introduced a hallmark e-commerce law, few would have imagined that five months later a global pandemic would all but shutter in-person shopping and the desert kingdom would ban most cash payments.
“There was a rush of businesses trying to go online,” Mazen Al Darrab, co-founder of the Riyadh-based e-commerce enablement company Zid, told Al-Monitor. “The COVID-19 measures doubled our percentage of users.”
For a government bent on digitizing its economy, the timing was fortuitous. Under contentious 35-year-old Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman and his Vision 2030, Saudi Arabia aims to transform its oil-dependent kingdom by fostering tech innovation and creating new jobs for its massive young population.
Businesses in Saudi Arabia are showing signs of recovery, with some big winners
By Khalid Suleimani and Loulwa Bakr, senior partners at Chrome Advisory
Some of the most optimistic people did not expect to see the rapid recovery of startups and small and medium enterprises (SME) in Saudi Arabia, following both the lockdown due to the Covid-19 pandemic and the increase of VAT. In addition, few expected to see the dynamic transformation of business models across many of the startups and SMEs, along with the overall growth of some within this sector. The notable and rapid intervention of the Saudi government, and the introduction of various initiatives to support these companies are to be credited for this recovery.