News

Google Contributed Billions To The Middle East Economy In 2021

Google contributed over $3 billion to the economy in both the UAE and Saudi Arabia in 2021 alone.

Published

3 years ago

May 27, 2022

google contributed billions of dollars to the middle east economy in 2021

For better or worse, Google is at the heart of the modern internet. Services like Google Search, Gmail, YouTube, Google Maps, and Google Drive are used by billions of people around the world, helping them find useful information, establish an online presence, and accomplish their goals, among many other things.

Interested to see how much value it contributes to the Middle East economy, the tech giant commissioned independent consultancy Public First to explore how Google’s products helped people, businesses, and workers, and the findings are astonishing: Google contributed over $3 billion to the economy in both the UAE and Saudi Arabia in 2021 alone.

To be more precise, Google helped support an estimated 12.2 billion SAR (or $3.25 billion) in economic activity in Saudi Arabia and AED 11.3 billion (or $3.08 billion) in the UAE.

In both countries, e-commerce played a vital role in Google’s contributions. Before the COVID-19 pandemic, people across the Middle East were fairly reluctant to shop online. Since the first wave of pandemic lockdowns restricted access to physical stores, e-commerce penetration more than doubled both in Saudi Arabia (from 5% to 10%) and the UAE (from 5.6% to 12.1%).

Other drivers of Google’s contributions include the company’s huge developer ecosystem or the various content creators it helped propel to stardom, such as the Iraqi creator known as Chef Shaheen, whose YouTube channel has around 2.4 million subscribers.

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“We see from the numbers that the content creator economy is growing massively…same thing for developers,” says Anthony Nakache, Google’s Managing Director in the Middle East and North Africa. “All signs are showing that there is a growth in the [digital] economy — all components are actually growing.”

On the flip side, any economy that becomes largely dependent on a single company can find itself in an unpleasant situation if the company stops being able to deliver its services, just like when the massive Facebook outage shook the internet in 2021.

News

Cemplicity Is Bringing Real-Time Patient Insights To The UAE

The advanced healthcare platform offers tools for chronic disease management and improved patient experiences.

Published

2 days ago

January 13, 2025

Nour Nasir

Cemplicity

Cemplicity — a leading health-tech company founded in 2013 — has launched its advanced platform in the UAE, aiming to revolutionize patient care and streamline healthcare operations to improve clinical outcomes.

Designed to analyze patient-reported data in real-time, the platform incorporates Patient-Reported Experience Measures (PREMs) and Patient-Reported Outcome Measures (PROMs) to collect and analyze patient feedback. By transforming the data into actionable insights, healthcare providers will be better equipped to improve quality of care and increase efficiency.

Cemplicity’s technology can even tackle chronic conditions like diabetes, which affects 12.3% of the UAE population. By enabling regular symptom tracking and side-effect monitoring (even when patients are at home) the platform ensures proactive care management, and can also optimize early detection and screening of cancers.

Blaik Wilson, Cemplicity’s CEO, shared: “We are excited to bring Cemplicity to the UAE, a nation committed to healthcare excellence. With the private healthcare sector evolving at an impressive pace, partnering with such forward-thinking providers enables us to transform patient feedback into meaningful insights that enhance patient experiences and improve outcomes”.

Wilson added: “Globally, healthcare produces 30% of the world’s data volume. Aggregating and anonymizing patient-reported data not only uncovers trends and evaluates treatment outcomes but also advances the UAE’s broader ambition to lead in medical research and innovation”.

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With a presence in nine countries and partnerships with major healthcare providers like the UK’s National Health Service (NHS), Cemplicity has already redefined how hospitals and clinics leverage patient feedback. Its tools, known for achieving high survey response rates, help link patient experiences to organizational KPIs and Net Promoter Scores (NPS), enabling measurable improvements in operations, and clinical outcomes, while fostering a culture of continuous improvement.

For the UAE market, the platform has been specially adapted to local needs, offering multilingual support (including Arabic) and seamless integration with tools such as WhatsApp and various hospital management systems.