'Singapore on steroids;: Dubai deserves more attention

Open to the world, the most populous of the seven emirates that make up the UAE is a trendsetter in Al, fintech and digitalisation.

- Vikram Khanna

Looking down as the Emirates airline's Boeing 777 approaches Dubai's international airport, you can see you're in a desert. The view is all brown sand, with a few shrubs and the occasional low-rise settlement. But as you get lower and closer to the city, you see neat rectangles and circles of green - obviously all man-made, dotted with date palms, and then, towering skyscrapers in the distance. The desert has disappeared.

You clear immigration and customs quickly - the airport is efficient and drive through broad highways into the city, past chic modern buildings, stores and malls.

Until oil was discovered in the late 1960s, Dubai - the most populous of the seven emirates that make up the United Arab Emirates (UAE) - was a backwater, dependent on activities such as pearl diving, date farming and fishing. But after the oil boom of the 1970s, it invested heavily in infrastructure, real estate, social amenities and tourism facilities.

It now boasts some of the world's tallest buildings, including the tallest of them all - the 828m, 163-storey Burj Khalifa, shaped like a rocket ship. Next door is the Dubai Mall, the world's biggest, with attractions that include an Olympic-sized ice-skating rink, an underwater aquarium and a virtual reality theme park. Dubai also has the world's biggest port operator DP World, which manages more than 90 terminals in 40 countries. It organised the 2024 Gulf International Technology Exhibition, which ran from Oct 13 to 17 and was billed "The Biggest AI Show on the Planet". Dubai is a great believer in "big".

OIL-DEPENDENT NO MORE

After the development and modernisation of the past 50 years, oil is no longer the mainstay of Dubai's economy, accounting for barely 1 per cent of its GDP and less than 5 per cent of government revenue. What has taken its place are clusters of activities around trade, tourism, real estate and financial and business services.