Global Manufacturing and Industrialisation Summit announces organising committee for Dubai event

The UAE will host the fourth edition of the global summit at the Dubai Expo 2020 site in November

The Dubai Expo will open its doors in four months. Expo 2020 Dubai

The Global Manufacturing and Industrialisation Summit (GMIS), a platform that brings together stakeholders from across the world to discuss and shape the future of the industrial sector, announced the organising committee for its 2021 summit in Dubai.

The committee will strengthen the summit’s multi-stakeholder approach, provide strategic guidance on different themes and steer its agenda, the GMIS said in a statement on Wednesday.

The organising committee will include officials from the UAE Ministry of Industry and Advanced Technology, Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Co-operation, Dubai Economy, Dubai Chamber, Jafza, Tecom, and the UAE Centre for the Fourth Industrial Revolution.

The GMIS will be held from November 22 to November 27 at the site of Expo 2020 Dubai. This year's theme is "Rewiring societies: repurposing digitisation for prosperity", with the conference providing a platform for global leaders from the industrial and technology sectors to discuss how to best prepare for a post-pandemic world.

“Despite the challenges faced over the last year, many opportunities have also surfaced and the only way to ensure that these opportunities lead to transformational outcomes is to get stakeholders from governments, businesses, academia and civil society to come together to shape the future of industrial growth and find solutions for a more inclusive and sustainable industrial sector,” Dr Sultan Al Jaber, UAE Minister of Industry and Advanced Technology and co-chair of GMIS, said during the first meeting of the organising committee, which was held online.

The UAE is aiming to a be manufacturing hub and has laid out a strategy to increase manufacturing’s contribution to the country's economic output to Dh300 billion ($81.6bn) over the next decade by encouraging local production.

The GMIS event “offers the opportunity to bring together diverse and experienced voices from across the world to create a shared vision for industry, society and the environment”, Dr Al Jaber said. The committee will play “an important role in ensuring the success of the summit in Dubai as the global manufacturing community looks to scale up business activity”, he added.

The summit is co-chaired by the UAE Ministry of Industry and Advanced Technology and the UN Industrial Development Organisation, or Unido. It is expected to lead to discussions about the latest developments in the industrial sector and will explore opportunities for co-operation and support its global progress.

The first two summits were held in Abu Dhabi in March 2017 and in the Russian city of Yekaterinburg in July 2019, with more than 3,000 delegates from 40 countries attending both the conferences.

The third event was initially scheduled for April 2020, alongside the Hannover Messe 2020 trade fair, but was postponed due to the pandemic and later held online.