Global technology firm Zoho revealed that its UAE office, which acts as its Middle East and Africa headquarters, has increased tenfold in the last five years, with a compound annual growth rate of 60%. At the company’s annual user conference, Zoholics Dubai, CEO, and Co-founder Sridhar Vembu also revealed plans to spend AED 100 million in the nation to facilitate growth.
Zoho’s growth in the UAE in 2022 was 45 percent, making it the company’s second-fastest expanding market worldwide. As part of its ‘transnational localism’ concept of being locally rooted while keeping internationally linked, the company has increased the number of Emirati and Middle Eastern employees over the previous year. A 50% increase in the country’s partner network in 2022 allowed Zoho to better serve its clients.
Adding that “we want to give back to the local community and be anchored in the local culture as we develop” is essential to the company’s “transnational localism strategy,” Sridhar Vembu explained the philosophy behind the plan. For the last five years, we have put resources into training local employees, expanding our partner network, including Arabic support into our products, and connecting to local payment gateways so that we can better serve the needs of customers in the Middle East. We’re committed to expanding our presence in the nation by investing in things like new hires, training programs, product localization, integration with local suppliers, and strategic partnerships to support local companies’ digital transformation initiatives.
Several groups, including the UAE’s Department of Economy and Tourism (DET) and Dubai Culture, have joined up with Zoho to make enterprise-level software affordable for companies of all kinds. It has also teamed up with respected academic institutions to provide further education, like the Manipal Academy of Higher Education (MAHE) and the Emirates Academy of Hospitality Management (EAHM). Since the year 2020, Zoho has invested AED 20 million in wallet credits to facilitate partnerships that provide over 3,500 small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) access to its cloud technologies. To help more than 200+ students and 300+ businesses acquire digital literacy, it also funded AED 4.5 million in upskilling efforts.
“Because of the state of the global economy, an increasing number of businesses are opting for digitalization and selecting unified platforms that help them break data silos and bring forth contextual real-time insights that enable them to make quick decisions and be nimble enough to adapt to changing market conditions. With 26 years of dedicated R&D, Zoho has developed its proprietary technology stack. Our customizable, integrable, and extendable applications provide a single platform for all of your company’s requirements, from customer engagement and marketing to accounting and corporate collaboration. Vembu explained, “Zoho is a great option for companies of any size because of this.”
Zoho One, which is a unified platform that contains over 50 different products, Zoho Books, which is accounting software that is FTA-approved and VAT-compliant, Zoho CRM, which is a customer experience platform, Zoho Workplace, which is an enterprise collaboration platform, and Zoho Creator are the top products that are driving Zoho’s growth in the UAE (low-code development platform).
IT services, health and fitness, real estate, manufacturing, and retail are the businesses that are generating the highest demand. Other industries include retail.
