can’t benefit from any investment a distributor might make to support the manufacturer, such as marketing or investing in a product specialist. “The mentality here is one of ‘we don’t want to buy from someone down the street; we’d rather buy from the representative office in Dubai,’” says Smith. “The flip side to this is that
‘Your network is the most important thing in the
Middle East’ Hans van den Berg, Audicom
to sell to dealers. Sometimes, they might take a piece of business if it needs a lot of integration, but in the truest sense, they are distributors.” Another barrier, he explains, is that “resellers and integrators won’t want to buy from a distributor – the mentality is to cut out the middleman, and since [the economic crash of] 2008, this mentality has intensified, so there’s just not the margin for distributors. It means that as a manufacturer, we have to touch as many integrators as we can and that becomes a challenge. When I arrived five year ago, my mandate was to reduce the number of channels, but what has happened is that our reseller database has quadrupled.”
Preferential treatment Christie refers end-user enquiries to one of its preferred integrator partners, who will manage the project. They will take the enquiry, link with Christie and support the end user. “The only end users I deal with are the events guys, because they know where to buy from and have services that are more than capable,” says Smith. “We deal with 40-50 event
companies. I want to put your business through the channel, because that’s where our livelihood comes from, and it’s in our interest to keep that channel happy. The channel will go directly to the end user, so you see, there’s no real space for a distributor.” The lack of a distribution
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we don’t have a lot of competition in this region. Some companies try to run their UAE operations from Europe and that works okay until something goes wrong with a system and you then
have the expense of flying in engineers to fix it. If you want to succeed in the UAE, you have to be here and you have to be good at relationship building.”
Twin centres Most of Christie’s UAE business is done in Dubai and Abu Dhabi –most people live in Dubai and commute to Abu Dhabi. While Dubai hosts most of the major events, Abu Dhabi is the region’s seat of government. Like all territories, the UAE was affected by the world economic crash of 2008, but Smith thinks that it took
about two years before the financial firestorm hit the AV market in this region. The collapse in confidence in Dubai initially led to a lot of business activity moving to Abu Dhabi. “You noticed a lot more people travelling between the two principal cities, and the road infrastructure was improved to make it easier to reach the centre of Abu Dhabi,” notes Smith. However, confidence seems
to be slipping back into Dubai. “The fixed install sector quietened down, but that’s coming back and the property market is picking
up,” says Smith. “The corporate sector tailed off dramatically, so quite a few companies are relying on government contracts. The residential sector took quite a battering two or three years ago – you probably heard stories of people abandoning their cars at the airport, even though they were still on loan. Yet, despite all of this, there is still cash in the channels. We’ve managed to keep credit to a minimum and we’ve managed to keep the financial risk low.” IE