MENA Opportunities

The growing e-commerce market isn’t limited to the Western world. We already know that China is exploding with online sales, and now a new infographic from Go-Gulf.com shows exactly how fast e-commerce is growing in the Middle East. A collection of Middle Eastern countries—Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Qata, Oman, Bahrain and Kuwait—called the Gulf Cooperation Council has about 90 million Internet users, who spent a collective $9 billon online in 2012. By 2015, that region is expected to spend $15 billion on e-commerce. Some highlights: 15 percent of Middle East businesses have an online presence, M-commerce in the region could reach $4.9 billion by 2015, 66 percent of consumers use the Internet to do product research before buying, Online games is the most popular e-commerce product in the region.

Rocket Internet can’t sit still, continuing to diversify their investments in different sectors across the Arab world. Their latest move? Investing US $10 million in Brazil-based taxi booking startup EasyTaxi . Earlier this year, clone factory Rocket started tackling the food-delivery industry with the launch of Hello Food in Morocco and Saudi Arabia. Now, the global parent company who brought Amazon-clone Jumia to Morocco is going after the taxi industry. Just today, Rocket Internet announced that  EasyTaxi  is expanding into Africa, Asia and the Middle East, starting with a launch in Nigeria. Easy Taxi itself is an app that, well, simply makes it easier for its users to order a taxi. Users enter their pickup point on the  iOS  or Android  app and wait for a confirmation of their booking, which includes a photo of the car and its model and license plate number. Users can follow the vehicle’s location in real-time as it approaches via GPS. Easy Taxi guarantees...

Rana El-Chemaitelly was so confident of her business’s potential she invested her children’s education fund. Rana El-Chemaitelly is most assuredly a businesswoman, but she’s also a mother. So it’s hardly surprising that these two roles both converged and clashed as she went about establishing The Little Engineer , a successful string of educational centers offering basic engineering skills to children and teens across Lebanon, and soon the whole region. It all began with a robot, as Chemaitelly tells it. When assigned to teach the robotics class in the faculty of engineering and architecture at the American University of Beirut, where she continues to instruct part-time, Chemaitelly brought the robots home to prepare her classes. The automatons quickly revealed their power: Her son’s fascination with them was sufficient to distract him from the video games he was, as Chemaitelly frankly puts it, “addicted to.” Inspiration struck, and the mother of three piloted The Little Engineer in...

With his company currently executing some $200 million worth of real estate projects in a turbulent Lebanese market, Ziad Maalouf, founder and CEO of Capstone Investment Group, says it all started with the willingness to take risks early on. “The decision to start your own company is one of the most difficult decisions you can take,” he says. “With startups, the failure-to-success ratio is very high. And add those risks to an unstable economic environment when you know the odds are against you.” A couple of years ago, at the height of his success with another Beirut investment firm, MENA Capital, Ziad felt that the time was right to move on and start something new. “Wissam and I decided to take a lot of risks to start this business,” he says, referring to his brother, the vice president and CFO of Capstone. “We both left stable jobs to start Capstone and to be on our own.” As it is wit...

I wanted to thank the incredible number of international achievers who have been following in exponentially increasing numbers MENA Opportunities! From the US, France, the UK, Germany, China, Brazil, Japan, etc... people from around the world are taking great interest in the MENA Region and its Opportunities. And I would add rightfully so! Stay tuned and spread the word. We are just getting started here! All the ingredients are there: a tidal wave of talented entrepreneurs, a total population estimated between 400 and 500 million and the most cash rich region in the world! Yes, we are not Silicon Valley (yet)! But patience. Give us 5 years and come back see. Or jump in now and Benefit! 

GE's " insourcing " of appliance manufacturing to the U.S. has been trumpeted as a major reversal of the trend of sending jobs abroad to lower cost locations, and has been characterized in the press as a kind of " onshoring " story. I see it differently: as a "NUMMI deja vu" story. You may recall that NUMMI was a joint venture of Toyota and GM, where Toyota took over one of GM's worst plants and turned it around with a new management system — using many of the same people and the same unions. GE's insourcing is actually quite similar. So, how did GE do it? First, a little relevant history: In the 1950s economic expansion drove growing demand for appliances. To meet this demand, GE created GE Appliance Park in Louisville, Kentucky, which reached a peak of 23,000 employees in 1973. In the early 2000s, as part of a huge offshoring trend in the business economy, GE shifted manufacturing to suppliers such as Samsung and LG. But these suppliers bec...

Coupons. Gift cards. Loyalty points. These tried-and-true tools of the retail trade might not be as sexy as other forms of marketing. But together they account for more than $165 billion in purchasing power ( $110 billion in gift cards purchased, $48 billion in loyalty points earned, and more than $5 billion in product coupons redeemed). That's almost as much as total e-commerce sales . These instruments share a common objective: to influence purchase decisions by equipping consumers with incremental spending power for specific brands and retailers. But consumers use them independently and individually (combining their value, when possible, takes a lot of manual effort), and store them in different places — often in drawers or folders where they lay forgotten and unused. This is changing as coupons, gift cards, and loyalty points all become digital — and, more important, mobile. Mobile enables all of this purchasing power to converge in one place, and potentially be used int...

The CIO paradox is a set of contradictions that lies at the heart of IT leadership. Be strategic and operational. Stay secure and boost innovation. Adopt emerging technologies, while weighed down by the past. Many CIOs have buckled under the CIO paradox, while others have managed to be effective despite it. In working with these successful CIOs over the years, I have found that they all share a common set of practices, philosophies and approaches. We are in the midst of a computing renaissance, when all CIOs will need to raise their game and master this same set of practices. Herewith, three items that should have a permanent place on any CIO's "breaking the paradox" checklist. Most large companies have underinvested in IT for decades. They've spent the bare minimum, and that's been fine, since IT has had to function merely as a "keep the lights on" necessity. As long as the mainframe systems aren't broken, let's not fix them. Today, however,...

McDonald's and Walmart, the two biggest private-sector employers in the U.S., don't pay their workers much. This more or less eternal truth is making one of its increasingly frequent appearances in the news this week. McDonald's is catching flak for a "sample monthly budget" for employees that sets aside $20 a month for health insurance and no money at all for heat. (Hey, it's July .) Walmart, meanwhile, is threatening to cut back on plans to open stores in Washington, D.C., after the D.C. council voted to impose a "super minimum wage" of $12.50 an hour on big retailers. For decades, most discussions of pay levels and income disparity in the U.S. have been accompanied by a pronounced economic fatalism. Pay is set by the market and the labor market has gone global, the reasoning goes — and when a Chinese or Mexican worker can do what an American can for less, wages have to go down. In explaining what's happened to autoworkers, say, that story m...

Is it better for a start-up to purse profitability initially, or go for growth? Advocates of that second, get-big-fast approach inevitably point to companies like Tumblr (the company founded by a high school dropout that Yahoo! just acquired for $1.1 billion before it had even $20 million in revenues) or YouTube (which was sold 19 months after its founding to Google for close to $2 billion), or other companies whose hyper-growth attracted suitors before a viable business model emerged.But it's important to consider how incredibly rare these examples are. For every Tumblr there are dozens of companies that had some success but never broke through — and hundreds more that never really got out of the starting block. Research by Harvard Business School senior lecturer Shikhar Ghosh, in fact, has found that fully 75% of venture capital-backed startups — presumably the crème de la crème of the startup world — failed to return the capital invested in them to their investors (let alone...

In 2003, after two years in Texas, Moe Ghashim moved back to his hometown of Aleppo, Syria. He was attracted to the country's immense potential and the aspirational drive of its people. Moe started a web design company, servicing his US-based clients with a growing workforce of 12 employees. Soon, he started dreaming of his next venture, a platform that would make setting up an online e-commerce store as easy as starting a Facebook page. It would be an Arab world première. But last year, bombs started hitting his city. Moe had to hastily pack his bags and head to neighboring Jordan. With neither a network nor funding, Moe set up base in Amman. He turned to a local start-up accelerator for help pursuing his idea.

Cyber attacks, once primarily directed against networks to steal confidential information and wreak virtual havoc, have begun to expand and are now directly affecting the physical world. For example, the recent hacking of the Associated Press's Twitter account by the Syrian Electronic Army and subsequent tweet about an explosion at the White House caused the U.S. stock market to decline almost 1% before the news was revealed as a hoax. In 2010 the computer worm Stuxnet was discovered and implicated in the attack that caused physical damage to centrifuges at Iranian nuclear enrichment facilities. In 2012 a hacker built and revealed a simple device that can open Onity-brand electronic locks (which secure over 4 million hotel room doors ) without a key. The growing Internet of Things, the connection of physical devices to the internet, will rapidly expand the number of connected devices integrated into our everyday lives. From connected cars, iPhone-controlled locks (versions of wh...

Entrepreneurs are a unique group of people, but they behave in patterns. In fact, research shows that most serial entrepreneurs display persuasion, leadership, personal accountability, goal orientation, and interpersonal skills. But in that same study, we also discovered a set of skills they do not possess.To rehash our methods, we assessed subjects identified as serial entrepreneurs on what personal skills they possessed. Then they were compared to a control group of 17,000. As before, this group was assessed on their mastery of 23 practical, job-related skills. We measured whether skills were well developed, developed, moderately developed, or needed developing. After analyzing the data, we found four distinct skills lacking in most serial entrepreneurs, three skills statistically significantly and one other also noticeably lacking. The statistical significance is derived by comparing the lowest ranking skills to the entrepreneurs' top skills, as evaluated in the first study. ...

Two brothers sharing ownership in a fourth-generation concrete business had a bitter falling out over an unlikely issue: a sailboat. The older sibling accused the younger of dipping into the till to support his racing habit. The younger brother struck back by issuing an ultimatum: buy out my share of the company, or sell me yours. An ugly fight ensued, affecting the business, the family, the employees, and the customers. The rift between these two men never healed. Both men went to their graves without speaking another word to one another; their children grew up as strangers instead of cousins. It's one of life's sad ironies that folks who love one another can end up having far more acrimonious business relations than people who are unrelated. And yet in our experience, conflict actually occurs less frequently in family businesses than non-family businesses. It's just that when it does break out, the fighting tends to be more intense. Why is that? The answer is devilishl...

People are often unreasonable and self-centered. Forgive them anyway. If you are kind, people may accuse you of ulterior motives. Be kind anyway. If you are honest, people may cheat you. Be honest anyway. If you find happiness, people may be jealous. Be happy anyway. Do good. Give the world the best you have and it may never be enough. Give your best anyway. For you see, in the end, it is between you and God. It was never between you and them anyway…

Imagine you're a first-time entrepreneur with an unvalidated business idea and no track record of making money for investors. You may have another kind of track record, such as working successfully at a large company. Or you could be a young entrepreneur, fresh out of college, ready and raring to get yourself launched. Unless you are willing to bootstrap yourself to some degree of validation of your concept, and can convince investors that there is real demand for what you offer, and a really large market, no one will write a check.

It is rare to see a media company in the Arab world listed in the stock market or heading for an IPO. However OSN might become the first to do so. Kuwait Projects Co (KIPCO), the country’s largest investment company by assets, told Arabian Business on Saturday it had hired financial group Rothschild to advise on an initial public offering of its pay-TV company OSN. KIPCO, a major regional investment house with stakes in media, industrial, financial and real estate companies, owns 60.5 percent of OSN and its Saudi-based partner Mawarid Group has 39.5 percent. OSN is a Pan Arab destination for brand new Western, Arabic and Filipino TV entertainment. OSN is home to 100 premium channels including 36 HD channels

Crowdcube has formed a JV partnership known as Crowdcube MENA. Co-founder of Crowdcube MENA, Omar Rana commented: "We are currently examining various regions to assess the best way of leveraging Crowdcube's platform to provide world-class crowdfunding in the MENA region".Rana continued, "60 per cent of the GCC is less than 30 years old, and 66.8 per cent of MENA + Africa is less than 30 years old. All these young people are bursting with ideas and passion, and they don't want to wait for governments and companies to use old fashioned ways to create jobs and support businesses. Crowdcube MENA is a catalyst for harnessing the financial and human capital in the region to promote social and economic development at an accelerated pace." He added, "The GCC clearly represents a core part of the MENA region, and over recent years various regimes allowing for sole foreign ownership and a combination of local/foreign ownership have been established, and these w...

Google announced on Wednesday it is launching a dedicated hub for the Holy month of Ramadan, offering Muslims around the world a host of new, Ramadan-specific features.The new hub, www.google.com/ramadan , will enable users to experience the ritual of Umrah, ‘the minor pilgrimage’, with a live stream from Mecca fed through the Saudi Ministry of Culture and Information’s YouTube channel.The hub will also help users to see how the Muslim world is celebrating Ramadan on social media. A ‘Trending Searches’ feature will show the search habits of users across the Middle East and Africa and South East Asia.Visitors to the site will be able to search for hashtags relevant to the Holy month, such as #breakingfast, and will be able to share pictures of their Ramadan moments.Earlier this week, social media company The Online Project released a report that showed Middle East users will increase their social media activity by 30 per cent during the Holy month.

Small and medium enterprises(SMEs), high growth technology and media companies attracted significant private equity investment last year and were the most active areas in the industry. According to a report from the MENA Private Equity Association, compiled in partnership with Zawya and KPMG, the private equity sector in the region continued to show significant signs of recovery with both investments and exits growing as compared to the previous year. The information technology (IT) sector alone accounted for about 40 per cent of the investment volume due to increased activity by venture capital funds in the region. Dr. Philip Boigner, director of technology investment at the Dubai Silicon Oasis authority and a member of the association’s task force said: “Most economies in the region are growing despite political uncertainty. Private equity houses are capitalising on this trend by focusing more and more on young companies that are on stellar growth trajectories. We have seen this, f...

Wixel Studios make games that play on the realities of this world. In the process, they’re transforming the realities of the region’s video game industry. The gaming company Wixel Studios  plays best in inversions. When there’s a reality before them, it’s turned, and then twisted, till their creation either allays a wrong or reveals an essential truth. “We’re always working in a response,” remarks Ziad Feghali, CEO and cofounder of the company. Take their first game: Douma, or “Puppeteer” in Arabic. It certainly got media play amidst local Lebanese press. In the street fighter style game you select one of Lebanon’s politicians (Aoun, Geagea, Franjieh, Hariri, Jumblatt or Nasrallah) and square off against another from the opposing camp. Every time a politicians wins a fight, his score publicly accumulates.The Wixel Studios team is made up of Reine Abbas, the head of art and Feghali’s wife, and Karim Abi Saleh, head of programming. The reality they faced materialized during the 200...

Insured micro-loans make for a valuable, quick route to cash when you find your business in a pinch. But with the high interest rates, do your research first and make sure it’s the best approach. Capital can be hard to come by, especially with the stringent requirements of Lebanon’s banks. The segment of the region’s population that falls into that category of “unbankables” is significant – and not necessarily beyond the entrepreneurship ecosystem. As a quick fix for an individual or business in a tough situation, CST Loans offers micro-loans: relatively small amounts of money (up to $5,000, with an average of $2,500) at an interest rate of up to 20%, to be paid off within approximately three years. These loans, operated by CST Holding (which has been around since ‘97) were developed by Chairman Andre Anhoury, with the simple goal of providing insured credit to those beyond the banks. Board Member Raja Abdallah and Regional Operations Manager Elie Zoghby have an honest view of the pr...

Their accountant and clearing agent may sometimes think they’re crazy, but Layane Makarem and Sabine Kassouf believe there’s method in whatever madness others perceive. The proprietors of A New Earth, Lebanon’s first fully certified organic food store, have just opened up their second premises in ABC Dbayeh. There, the shelves are fully stocked with products imported from all over the world – but the lights still flicker as some last minute technical problems are resolved. It’s hectic at the moment, they admit, but even in a few months when things go back to normal you can anticipate this duo of hands-on business owners will remain busy. “We do everything,” Kassouf, 38, says. “We meet the suppliers, we choose the products, when the products arrive we are here with the workers coming from the port. I think they’ve never seen women being there, carrying loads of boxes.” “I think they are shocked sometimes to see two women waiting, dressed in pants, and ready to pick up things,” Makarem...

Michel Nehme of Cedrus Ventures, a venture capital and private equity firm, is on the lookout for top start-ups. He has seen a myriad of mistakes come through his door. Here are a few pointers on what ‘treps would do well to remember.Michel Nehme knew the region’s start-up scene was just that – starting up. Fresh off an MBA from Harvard in 2009, he returned to Lebanon and saw opportunity. “My initial idea was to be an entrepreneur myself, but then I decided to take a step back and view it from the VC perspective.” With a stint in consulting at Booz & Company, he had the background necessary to help mentor and coach innovative thinkers from the region.

Technology keeps racing ahead and it can be difficult for businesses to stay on top of what their consumers prefer. Mobile applications are the next market wave. People are using mobile apps for everything from finding a local restaurant to managing their online banking. Jason Ankeny of Entrepreneur.com believes that mobile apps are essential today, especially for small businesses. Why? The research firm comScore finds that in the US, 40 per cent of mobile-users utilize apps and an MTV survey found that 77 per cent of this population compare mobile apps to personal assistants, necessary devices that make their world easier to navigate. Inc.com reports that a Deloitte study found US smartphone users download at least one new app per week. Among US users, a Nielsen study found that mobile app users download games most of all, entertainment apps secondly and the third-highest-selling apps are those that help consumers in terms of productivity, navigation and searches. What’s the mobile ...

The UAE ranks 38th on the Global Innovation Index (GII) 2013 for its achievements in the socio-economic spheres.In the Middle East and North Africa (Mena) region, the nation is leading in the areas of political, regulatory and business environment, human capital and education. Tertiary education and efforts for research and development are other areas where the UAE has done remarkably, according to the index, which has rated the nations for their efforts toward innovations and the outcomes. The nation has also scored well for its infrastructure ICT as well as physical, ecological sustainability, and business sophistication including knowledge workers, innovation linkages and knowledge absorption. The UAE, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Kuwait lead the Middle East in overall innovation performance according to the GII 2013 Index, published by Cornell University, Insead and the World Intellectual Property Organization (Wipo), a specialized agency of the United Nations. This year’s study benef...

While private equity firms saw a reduction in the level of new funds raised in 2012, the investment sector has shown strong signs of recovery, with the overall pool of funding available to SMEs, technology and media companies attracted significant interest throughout the region last year.The 2012 Private Equity and Venture Capital in the Middle East Annual Report, issued by the MENA Private Equity Association and compiled in collaboration with KPMG and Zawya, found the total number of investments increased from 84 in 2011 to 91 in 2012, a year-on-year increase of 8.33 percent.While the overall total value of funds announced rose by $200m to $1.1bn last year, there was a decline in the value of new funding raised and added into the pool of financing available, down from $900m in 2011 to $400m in 2012.“The reduced level of fundraising... reflects the general lack of deal flow in the region as regional PE (private equity) players continue focusing on preserving and enhancing value from ...

If you are like me an avid reader of the tech offline/online media, you may be under the impression that every other 21 year old kid in California is being thrown 10 million USD at for a s* business plan pulled off the web. Let me make it clear to all of you who might feel down reading these endless stories!

The concept of car polling or ride sharing is not new, but it is new to the region. Another example about how proven business models can become successful companies by adapting to the "MENA flavor". Sure, it may sound like copy/paste to many but as I keep repeating, it will take time for a region the size of MENA (500 million people) to catch up with the rest of the world. But it will, eventually. As to Kartag , it has developed an iOS and Android app that enables car drivers in Cairo Egypt to share their ride with friends and friends of friends. The concept is simple. If you are looking for people to join you in your ride you post a request and people who want to use a ride post also a request then a matching happens enabling users to agree in both others. Also users can rate each other to give a feedback to the community.

Arcoten, the pan-arab focused entrepreneurship development and venture foundry has announced the launch of Arcoten Accelerate , the virtual venture acceleration program. The program was adapted and based on Steve Blank’s customer development based startup model. A model around founders – early on – getting out of the building to validate business models by engaging with customers before investing time and money to build their full product and service offering. Unlike what startups are used to in the investment scene in the region, Arcoten Accelerate reduces the risk by not asking founders to build a 50 page plan or seek investment before helping them discover a repeatable and scalable business model. Arcoten Accelerate is a 9 week Acceleration program aiming to turn an idea into a validated scalable and repeatable business model, with the option of enrolling in an extended 9 month version of the program, where completing the product and service offering and building the venture is al...

The term covers an extensive region, extending from Morocco to Iran including the majority of both the Middle Eastern and Maghreb countries. The term is roughly synonymous with the term the Greater Middle East. The population of the MENA region at its least extent is about 381 million people, about 6% of the total world population Bahrain – 1,235,000, Egypt – 79,090,000, Iran – 76,923,000, Iraq – 31,234,000, Israel – 7,654,000, Jordan – 6,407,000, Kuwait – 3,566,000, Lebanon – 4,224,000, Libya – 6,420,000, Morocco – 32,200,000, Oman – 2,845,000, Gaza Strip – 1,657,000, West Bank – 2,515,000, Qatar – 1,697,000, Saudi Arabia – 27,137,000, Syria – 22,505,000, Tunisia – 10,433,000, UAE – 4,976,000, Yemen – 23,580,000. At its greatest extent, its population is roughly 523 million.

Launched in 2009, the MENA 100 Business Plan Competition supports and inspires innovative entrepreneurship in the Middle East and North Africa. MENA 100 rewards innovative and feasible business ideas and connects the entrepreneurs behind them with sources of finance and business contacts in MENA and OECD economies. MENA 100 also encourages entrepreneurial spirit by putting regional talent into the spotlight and by exposing outstanding business initiatives. The MENA 100 Business Plan Competition is co-organised by the MENA-OECD Investment Programme, through the MENA-OECD Enterprise Financing Network and the MENA Centre for Investment, and in partnership with the Islamic Development Bank, the United Nations Industrial Development Organisation and the Bahrain Development Bank.

I keep hearing talk (mostly complaints) about the MENA Startup Ecosystem. Or in other words, how entrepreneurs cannot easily find funding. This is quite intriguing given the exponential number of VCs, Incubators, Accelerators, etc... currently mushrooming across the region! Now YES, the Ecosystem is still far from being as sophisticated as in Silicon Valley? But what do people expect? An overnight perfect system. I, for one, believe that all the necessary ingredients to success are here: talented entrepreneurs, probably the most cash rich region in the world and a tidal wave of goodwill underlying it all! Now that's a lot for a region that until recently was oblivious to Entrepreneurship. So here is my take: patience! All good things come in due time. Let the Ecosystem mature, i.e. natural selection of the fittest, and in time will emerge what I believe to be the single most attractive entrepreneurial sector in the world. Again: just a little patience.

With a growing pool of Arabic fashion talent in the Middle East, Diwanee launched Mooda.com offering regional fashion designers a premium online platform to showcase their creativity and grow their business by reaching customers worldwide. Mooda.com goes one step further by supporting its e-commerce with premium fashion content. In addition to a large selection of ready-to-wear collections and accessories from regional designers, Mooda.com aims to be the source for trends, tips and comprehensive news about the stylish and throbbing fashion scene from the Middle East provided by in-house stylists. On June 28th, Mooda.com will introduce its ‘Exclusive’ range featuring limited edition items through unique partnerships with Jojoba jewelry, Sarah’s bag and Caroline by Caroline Seikaly. “We are really proud to be supporting regional talents. Mooda offers them a window to the world and we are fully committed to helping the Arab fashion scene stand out on the global stage.” commented Delphi...

The Bayt.com Specialties platform enables professionals to express their thought leadership in their professional areas of expertise, and allows employers to tap into this with innovative tools for finding professionals whose true abilities surpass those represented through traditional CVs. Bayt.com Specialties brings together professionals in an online environment that empowers them to share their knowledge within their self-specified areas of interest and expertise. It allows them to demonstrate their skills and knowledge amongst their peers and to potential employers, by contributing to open dialogues related to their specific specialties. It presents the opportunity for professionals to expand their circle of connections, while establishing a presence as an expert in their particular field.

Last year, a small group of people launched in Beirut an Organic Fast Food Business http://www.myobox.net/ . The concept was well tested and has progressed really well during the course of the year. It is now time for us to grow and to take this proven product to other markets. We are looking for interested strategic investors who have a passion for and believe in the organic food business and its future.

Xternalize Holdings ® is a Technology Holding Company owned by the Brazilian Haddad family. It holds significant investments in the South America and United States Technology Sector. Xternalize Holdings' advantages include significant and reliable capital, a patient investment philosophy and a subsequently long-term investment horizon. Since its inception in 1997, Xternalize Holdings has made investments in more than 30 South America and United States companies for a total amount of over 250 million USD. Xternalize Holdings is now currently looking to invest big time in MENA Startups! Xternalize Holdings

Behind Keefak stands a small group of dedicated and passionate Lebanese expatriates sharing the same vision to reconnect 15 million Lebanese descents established mainly in Europe, North America, Latin America, Australia & Africa, with their parents or grandparents’ mother tongue and hence the Lebanese culture, as well as foreigners and tourists visiting the region. The idea flourished when Hadi El Khoury, a young Lebanese entrepreneur currently working and residing in France for more than ten years, became father. Despite the fact that he has left Lebanon to complete his studies and pursue his career in information security, Mr. El Khoury is keen on maintaining strong bonds with his country of origins and doing the best he can to give back to Lebanon what it has given him. His main concern was to teach his daughter born and raised in France the Lebanese dialect. Thus, with the help of his brother Joseph El Khoury, a software engineer who is the app architect and iOS developer, Ra...

Perma Glaze is a worldwide leader in the reglazing and resurfacing of numerous surfaces and fixtures. Their state-of-the-art technologies can easily refinish bathtubs, sinks, cabinets, ceramic kitchen and wall tiles, countertops and more. For just a fraction of replacement costs, your home will look like you spent thousands of dollars on remodeling, all without breaking your budget! Results will astound you!  Proprietary blends of polymer resins that will make virtually every fixture in the Bathroom or Kitchen look like new! Finishes can be matte or glossy and are available in any color. restores worn or damaged fixtures and surfaces to their original luster in 3-4 hours without removal at a fraction of the replacement cost!

MENA OPPORTUNITIES ® (MO) is an innovative "less is more" online platform focused on the MENA (Middle East and North Africa) region that serves two purposes. MO highlights the best MENA Opportunities curated just for you: money, finance, investments, technology, media, real estate, funding, startups, entrepreneurship, management, news and much more… MO also offers efficient and cost-effective global advertising solutions to MENA firms seeking MENA and global exposure as well as global firms seeking MENA exposure. You can access our web platform and/or our mobile optimized platform. To subscribe, simply enter your email address in the black box below and start receiving our convenient Email Digests. No worries, you can instantly unsubscribe in a click and you will never hear a thing from us again. Promise! Read more.