Dubai Industrial City, the emirate's first dedicated industrial destination, has seen tremendous growth during the first quarter of 2007 with four out of the six industrial clusters of the city fully leased to more than 300 clients.
Rashed Al Ansari, Chief Executive Officer of Dubai Industrial City, a member of Tatweer explained that demand is far outstripping the available industrial land at the city.
"We are witnessing great demand on our facilities and during the past three months we have leased 38 million square feet of industrial land bringing the total size of land leased during the first and second phases to 121 million square feet out of an available total of 180 million square feet that are on offer for the first two phases," he explained.
Map of Dubai Industrial City
The CEO of the first dedicated industrial zone in the GCC region attributed the strong performance of Dubai Industrial City to its ability to match the expectations of industrial investors and willingness to alter its plans to meet their requirements.
"We are very flexible to the needs of our clients and we have already completed the grading of the first phase of the project and we are willing to speed up the process of grading the lands of the second phase if investors desire to have a quicker access to their sites to start construction work," he pointed out.
He also said that during the past three months, numerous initiatives have been launched such as the launch of the Testing and Laboratories cluster to attract industrial laboratories and testing companies to the city as part of a dedicated Research and Development area in Dubai Industrial City.
"We also opened our first Labour City where a total of 12,500 workers and supervisors are currently living across 14 buildings and we signed up the Department of Economic Development (DED) to set up an office at our offices to help facilitate the business transactions for investors as part of a larger plan to bring government departments closer to our clients," Rashed confirmed.
Designed as a custom-built one-stop industrial and commercial hub for industries to grow and develop their businesses on a work, live and play model, Dubai Industrial City saw last year the launch of a multi-billion dirham project to build warehousing facilities, seven Labour Cities, and other world class amenities as an integral part to such a destination.
With these developments, Al Ansari said Dubai Industrial City is on track to achieve its long term target of contributing US$10 billion to the GDP of the emirate.
"We expect our clients to invest around US $ 15 billion to set up their various industrial units across the city by 2015 where the city will be fully operational." Rashed concluded.
Source: Jiwin
