Thank you, Alan. We all have here four executives from industries that seem to be very, very different. And yet they're all dealing with the same big issues that Alan described. AI, technology generally, climate, the after effects of the pandemic, what's going on with new trading patterns. These things are large and fast changing, and we all have to deal with them. So we're going to talk about all of these, looking for commonalities in how these executives are dealing with these issues. And we may find that they are not as different as they first appeared to be. We could start many different ways, but Abdul Nasser, I'd like to start with you. I mentioned climate and sustainability as one of the issues. People will naturally think, well, OK, the aluminium business involves mining the alumina, moving lots of big things around in ships. Making aluminium uses a great deal of electricity. So there are a lot of obvious issues there. How have you thought about these?
First of all, thank you for the invitation. It's giving me great pleasure to be here with you, such an honoured panelist and great crowd here. I would like to start by saying aluminium is playing a crucial role for the development of more sustainable societies. Aluminium is basically into everything we have these days, from mobile phones to EV cars to mass transit systems, including aerospace. So I think we'd like to continue doing all these things for our production of aluminium. Aluminium has also special characteristics that is basically light, yet strong, and it is thermally and electrically conductive. And it's formable, and basically it's difficult to be replaced. And it's very important to mention that the aluminium can be infinitely recyclable. For example, your EV cars, it's getting closer to end of life. We can take it, recycle it over and over without losing the mechanical characteristics. And aluminium is considered today to be the most recyclable metals in the world, comparing to others. And if you compare our aluminium production, carbon footprint over the next, let's say, 100 years, because of the continuous recyclable. I mean, to recycle the aluminium, you need to only consume 5 to 10% of the energy. This is really great, and that's why we made a decision. And we announced that we're going to construct 170,000 tonnes of recyclable secondary aluminium smelter in the UAE. And we are looking also for more investment globally, because this will give us an easy access to, let's say, green aluminium. And this is what our customer is demanding. And also we need to be proud that EGA were the first company in the world to produce aluminium based on solar power. So if you take the aluminium produced by solar, you blend it with recyclable metal, it will give you the most greenness aluminium in the world. And this is what we want to do going forward in the future. Back to your question, what we are doing about the sustainability of our current aluminium production. For me, sustainability is a much broader aspect compared to decarbonisation, even though we believe decarbonisation is the main challenge for our climate change. Luckily, we now have a plan, which has already been approved by our management and shareholders, that we are committed for net zero by 2050, in line with our UAE net zero by 2050 strategic initiatives. And we are going to do much more green investment going in the future. Even our growth plan will be relying heavily on our state of the art EGA technology, and we will use only green power to grow. The industry has its own challenges, like the other industry. So all these challenges have already been shared with the industry expert, and we are working on a plan how to basically work together and deliver the goods. It's not an easy journey to basically take for the next 25 years, but we are committed to do it.
Yeah, it's interesting, because the recyclability of the aluminium actually makes it clear that you could be not a detriment to the environment, quite the opposite. You could actually be helping it.
Yes. Good point.
Christian, people may or may not recognize that real estate is a huge element in climate and sustainability. There's various research showing that large percentages of all the greenhouse gases, of CO2 especially, come from buildings. This is an issue that your industry and your company must now deal with. How are you dealing with it?
Sure. Yeah, the built environment is roughly causing 40% of the CO2 emissions in the world, of the carbon emissions in the world. That obviously includes the building up of the building and then the operations of that building. So it's very important if building materials are going green beforehand, because that will reduce it very much. As JLL, we have been signing up to our own net zero pass by 2040. And now the biggest challenge for us is not so much the carbon emissions we have as a company ourselves, but what is in scope three, so the emissions of our clients. And so we are helping our clients to go green in their built environment. That is the fastest kind of growing revenue stream within JLL, is helping our clients to decarbonize their buildings. So that's one piece what we are doing. And I can only encourage everybody to only build and lease buildings which are as green as possible, because it's fairly easy and there are much tougher parts to take them green than buildings. And so it's an important part.
It's interesting that this has actually become a business opportunity for JLL. People may not realize it, but you are, in addition to the traditional services in real estate, you are now a digital technology company, right? And some of it has to do with keeping the buildings greener.
Sure. At the end of the day, when you think about buildings, it's a massive source of data. And you have to be able to analyze that data which is coming out of those buildings. And in order to know whether you are on the right path to go green, you also have to analyze that data of buildings. And that has been so far still quite challenging because you have so many different materials going into a building. And therefore to capture all the carbon which is already embedded in the building and then the operations of that building, all of that has to be measured and then analyzed. And then you have to turn that into a strategy how you take that green. And so you have to be a technology company if you want to service your clients on that level. And therefore this has been a very big thing for us over a decade now.
Nigel, your business has to do with the technology and all about the technology. You help all kinds of companies, different companies, go on a digital transformation, a technological transformation. Are your clients asking you for help? Well, about climate, but about what other things?
Yeah, I think if you really think about any sustainability journey in the context of any of our clients, whether it's like Christian mentioned in the context of the work they're doing at JLL or in the context of mining, I think in every industry technology has got to be one of the sources in which you actually drive opportunities to become more sustainable. And I think that starts with choices at the organizational level, but at choices through the organization. So one of the things we did is we built a platform called Emissions, which essentially in real time helps organizations start to make determinations about the choices that they're making in the context of actual carbon implications. And this at a top level seems kind of a very simple idea, but the reality is thousands of decisions made in an organization almost on a real-time basis influence the ultimate impact. So if you're somebody that's mining, where you actually determine how you move from point A to point B or where you determine site choices, or if you think about something as simple as an organizational implication like how people use and consume paper, printing, and how much of these choices you can automate as opposed to having to make people make decisions. So now one of the biggest areas of sustainability in the context of digital transformations is thinking about how you can actually set up parameters in the context of an organization so you just enable default choices that people are making almost on a consistent basis that are more sustainable than not. And ultimately then look at the aggregate of these choices in the context of goals that you've set. So that's a huge part of it.
It's really interesting here also because what you have found are a number of significant opportunities to help with this problem.
I don't think there is a path to being more sustainable without actually leveraging technology to transform the way you do things. I mean, there's just no path, whether it's electrification or manufacturing in industries like automotive or it's thinking about the use of real estate in industries like financial services or retail. Unless you're actually in real time, like Christian was talking about, analyzing the data, understanding what choices people are making and starting to influence them in a very consistent manner, you effectively, I feel, will struggle to really move the needle on sustainability.
Yeah, it's funny. We started with climate and sustainability. Now we're talking about technology. Inevitably, I think. Mikhail, technology is the basis of your whole business at E&N. Can you describe to us the story, the journey from telecom to what you are now and how it's a good thing for the larger world?
Thank you for your question. Telecommunications, they're a backbone of modern business and modern life. It's really difficult to imagine not only business but even current life without connectivity. And connectivity is the main service that telecommunications companies like E&N, formerly known as Etisalat, provide. But demand for connectivity increases exponentially. We still remember how a few decades ago speed was a few megabits per second. In the very near future with 6G technology, speed is forecasted to achieve one terabit per second, which is one million of megabit. So just mind-boggling speed, but it is demanded by modern applications. Second level, so first level is connectivity. Second level is dataNow even we get orders and let's say a question from our European customers. They want even our raw materials because they would like to buy from the UAE rather than China. And for me it works both ways. And for us to also to grow in a more responsible way, especially in the space of sustainability, there are more than 100 criteria we need to meet. And to satisfy most of these criteria, I think investing in the UAE is the strategic initiative we have taken. And we will support also the government, let's say, operation 300 billion, make it in the Emirate initiative. This is a great thing for us and our supplier and which will help us to grow in more sustainable way.
I have to ask you, Christian, about China with regard to real estate. Whether someone is interested or an expert in real estate or not doesn't really matter. We know that it is a huge element of the Chinese economy. And we've been reading a lot of articles in the newspapers lately. What's your assessment of the real estate situation in China now? What do you expect it to become?
Well it is indeed a very large part of the GDP and it is a very relevant economy in the world as we all know. So we all have to be concerned about that market. And I think it is, especially on the residential sector, a pain for the Chinese people. It's a drag on the Chinese economy and therefore it's also a concern for the Chinese government. And therefore I'm pretty convinced that the Chinese government will do whatever they can to kind of get control of that situation, ease kind of the environment for those real estate developers to kind of stabilize that situation, get those unfinished buildings finished so that the people who kind of made their down payments with all their savings, that they actually can get into those apartments. I think going to your trade point, what is very important and it's kind of related to the situation we have at the moment with China is that up to the GFC in 2008, we were all talking about globalization and the trade patterns were easing up and that was driving a lot of wealth and a lot of GDP growth in the world. And since then we are going backwards on that. And people talk a lot about different tax situations in the world. What is almost more important is the tax which is coming from regulation and bureaucracy. And we have an enormous increase of regulation and bureaucracy in the world, which makes it more and more difficult to globalize your business. And ESG, as much as we are supporting it, is a big driver of it because we have now ESG rules not only on a national level, we have ESG rules on a local level, on a city level. And therefore, I hope that we will all encourage our governments to get back on that trade is good for the wealth of the world and it drives poor people into the middle classes.
Nigel, I want to ask you a broad question, but I think it may be revealing. You have clients in all kinds of industries. What are they asking you about most now? Specifically, I think about almost exactly a year ago, November 30th, 2022, when OpenAI made available to the general public, ChadGPT, and it changed the world. What have your clients been doing in response?
So I think, firstly, most of our clients have been on this journey of transforming themselves digitally for a while. And I think what you're starting to see with AI is the consciousness essentially raised across the organizations with people recognizing that this is going to be a meaningful shift. The last time I saw a moment like this was in the mid-90s when the dot-com bubble was starting to emerge where people were like, this internet thing is going to be a big thing. And in Sapient, we're in the business of launching some of the world's first banks online, some of the first retailers, and living through that at the time, that optimism about how transformational this could be, I feel like we're in a similar moment right now. And I feel like the discourse more broadly in the world since ChadGPT launched, and even with the announcements back and forth about the changes in the organization and AI more broadly as late as last week, the consciousness of people to fundamentally recognize that this is going to be transformational for our business has been huge. So to give you some examples of just the kinds of things people have been doing and how they're thinking about it now. So we have a client, one of the largest retailers in the world, that have been, we developed an AI platform for them in the context of sustainability to optimize van routes. So it analyzed everything people were buying, and you'd look at what people were buying and then determine whether they'd have a refrigerated truck or a non-refrigerated truck, and then you would stop them driving all over themselves. Because what used to happen before is as orders online started to grow, the complexity of making those choices became too difficult, right? Now a lot of those are moving much faster in the context of not decisions that people are even involved in, but are automatically prioritized on the basis of ordership. In the UAE, as an example, one of our clients is Miral, which is a big entertainment destination. And thinking about the journey from when a customer starts to plan a holiday through the experience in any one of the theme parks that they're participating in all the way to the time that they go, starting to anticipate every interaction. Today, that's actually, historically, customer service there would be done by people. Now a lot of those queries can be handled by AI and by machines answering questions. The answers to which are pretty straightforward and require very little error correction, like how do I get from point A to point B? Or how do I actually change X, Y, or Z in my room? And these are all things that are obvious, but were not obvious a year ago in terms of the speed at which and the magnitude at which they would transform industries and our experience as people.
Yep. Mikhail, let's take a big picture view. We've talked about technology a lot as well as other things. Is AI and the technologies associated in general fundamentally going to be for the social good?
I firmly believe that AI will be for the social good. Already now we see how AI changing and improving lives in many aspects. Let's take digital health, for example. We just again in the university for AI, we saw examples how AI helps to improve health outcomes. Smart mobility allows to decrease number of accidents by 60%. Energy efficiency, we actively use AI for making our networks more efficient. And on the upcoming COP28 event, we will commit our net zero pledge in 2030 for UAE and a little bit later for the rest of international operations. My favorite example how UI helps to deliver social good is a case that we developed together with fire service in the UAE. In the UAE, every villa has a fire alarm that is connected to the fire service control room. And when fire alarm goes off, fire engine goes to put down a fire. Unfortunately, more than 70% of alarms are false alarms. That can be because alarm ran out of battery, because there is a dust storm, because someone is smoking and so on. Our data experts developed a model that allows to predict whether the alarm is real fire or it's a false alarm and effectively gives each alarm a score, a rating probability that it's real alarm. This of course helps to improve efficiency of fire service operations, but even more importantly, it helped fire engines to come to real fires faster, effectively saving lives.
It's a great story. And it just strikes me here, we've been talking about these very large issues, fast changing issues that everybody in this room is worried about. And yet the whole tone of this conversation has been an optimistic one. It really is something that is reassuring to hear from all of these different industries. And it's a great note on which to end. So let us please say to Abdul Nasser, Mikhail, Christian, Nigel, thank you so very, very much.