In any event, UAE is good for business

CEO of conference company talks about growing a business in the Middle East.

Peter Rigby, the chief executive of Informa, says the UAE is an attractive place for business because of efficiencies.

Peter Rigby is the chief executive of Informa, an international business that has its headquarters in Switzerland and some 150 offices around the world. The company puts on Arab Health and other conferences and exhibitions in the region:

How important is the Middle East as you expand?

We have a bigger base here already than, say, in Brazil, China or India. It's certainly grown quicker than the developed markets, which are pretty sluggish. The developing markets are very important to us and we've invested heavily not just on the events side. We've invested in terms of training, conferences, exhibitions and publications.

You acquired IIR, a major events company, a few years back. What lesson has Informa learnt after acquiring a major competitor?

It gave us critical mass. The old Informa had stuck to a conference model, and IIR had effectively gone from a conference model that migrated into a trade show model. Many of the big shows we have here now all started off as small conferences. It's a model we've retained to this day, that mixture of conferences that become exhibitions, and when they are an exhibition then we try to raise the standard of them.

Are you continuing to expand?

We've looked to start things. We've looked to acquire things available. We've looked to grow things. I think it's fair to say that Arab Health is the best health exhibition in the world and has certainly grown more quickly than any other health exhibition. We'll continue to try to grow events like that and take successful ones like that into other markets in 2011 and 2012. We'll do bits of Arab Health in Abu Dhabi. We'll do a health exhibition in South Africa, China, Germany.

Do you prefer to grow business by boosting demand for existing products or creating new ones?

I think you have to do both. If you could just grow existing products, like running a magazine with more ads every month and it gets thicker and thicker, then that's great because launching something new always has risks associated with it. But from our perspective, we know things will wax and wane. One of the ways to get around that is to put events into new places. This is what we call geo-cloning. But at the same time as doing that, to build and start new conferences, new exhibitions.

How do outside businesses push into the UAE?

Well, I think it's an attractive place for businesses to be located because it's so efficient. So now it's a place where companies have their Middle Eastern offices, which I think is increasingly the case. We have some people in other GCC countries but the main centre is here in Dubai.

What limitations are there here?

You have to remember it's a smallish country. Therefore, it's the region you're targeting. You have to think: my customers are in the whole region because Dubai on its own isn't sufficient to support that.