AMMAN - Leading figures of Arab and German family businesses will meet Saturday and Sunday to exchange experiences and strengthen professional ties over a two-day summit.
The Arab-German Family Business Summit is hosted and arranged by the International Institute for Family Enterprise, a research institute at the Witten/Herdecke University in Germany.
Attending the summit will be a "handpicked" group of roughly 70 German, 40 Jordanians and 60 Arab owners of family businesses, Paul Dietze, co-founder of the institute, told The Jordan Times on Wednesday.
Among the guests are some of the largest and most powerful family business owners from the two regions, including Egyptian Samih Sawiris, who will join a panel discussion on Saturday and Jordanian Ghassan Nuqul and German Jrgen Heraeus, both of whom will act as co-chairs for the meeting.
The summit, to be held under the auspices of Prime Minister Samir Rifai,consists, in part, of panel discussions with leading academics and businessmen presenting the most recent research in the field and, in the second part, of business matchmaking, a concept that Dietze said has "enormous potential".
"[German and Arab businessmen] sit down together and it's amazing how many ideas come up and how many partnerships come out of this when the owners talk to each other on an eye-to-eye level," he said, adding that family owned businesses often deal with the same problems - succession, rivalry, heritage - but different cultures come up with different solutions for these problems.
And it is from these differences the summit draws its strength. Dietze explains: "Maybe some guy from Yemen comes up with this really great idea on how to deal with an issue that a multibillion German company is struggling with."
In 2007, Dietze and his fellow co-founder, Tim Tiller, went on a research trip to Cairo where they came up with the idea of founding an institute that conducted research on family businesses in the Middle East.
"Basically all business here is family business and even politics are very much dominated by families often times. And still there haven't been any good research on Arab family business topics," he indicated.
The institute was founded and the academic research launched in 2007, but Dietze and his partner wanted to create a platform to bring a network of German family businesses, who already were working with the Witten/Herdecke University, together with Arab family businesses.
And so, in 2008 the first Arab-German Family Business Summit was held in Cairo bringing together 200 leading family business owners from Germany and the Arab countries. In 2009, Bahrain hosted the second gathering.
The summits have proven to be a "pretty awesome concept", Dietze said, mentioning a newly build laboratory in Egypt and the opening of an Arab branch of a German polling institute as but a few of the direct results of the summits.
He highlighted the economic strength of the Arab world as a main reason for the German interest in cooperation and investment, noting that there are "few regions globally which still have large cash reserves and are not heavily indebted".
"It's China and it's the Arab world," he pointed out, "these are economies that are going to be really, really interesting and probably quite dominating forces in the next twenty to thirty years, we believe".
After having held one summit in North Africa and one in the Gulf Region, Dietze and his partners felt it would be suitable to host the 2010 summit in the Levant and Jordan was chosen for that. Dietze explained why: "Jordan is a very interesting economy. And we find that a lot of the families here are very well-educated and have lot of intellectual capacity when it comes to discussing these issues. And this is something that we find very inspiring."
© Jordan Times 2010
