Digital transformation is growing, businesses are becoming more purpose driven, perspectives are shifting and the pace of change is accelerating, discussed a panel of experts sharing insights on what will shape the next 12 months.
Bloomberg recently organised a virtual event titled ‘The Year Ahead Summit’. The event, sponsored by Investment Promotion Agency Qatar, Holcim and McKinsey & Company, brought together CEOs and global business leaders from an array of indus-tries - finance, retail, travel, healthcare, technology and more - to map out a strategic blueprint for global business in the year ahead.
David Gitlin, Chairman and CEO, Carrier, a multinational home appliances corporation discussed about the challenges and opportunities ahead by looking at the structural changes that have occurred or are in the process of occurring.
“It is critical we provide people with safe and healthy indoor environment. We have an opportunity to create a safe and healthy indoor air environment with the right kind of venti-lation and filtration systems and take drastic actions,” he said Speaking about manufacturing capability and supply chain issues that have caused disruption Gitlin said, “We are trying to take a much more strategic approach so that we come out of this pandemic with a much more robust and resilient way. For example, we are investing more in auto-mation, and have gone from million manufacturing hours that were automated to three million by end of last year and we are going to double that number in next five years, and we are starting to work directly with chip manufacturers instead of distributors.”
Invest Qatar tweeted recently, “Will industry leaders use recent learnings from the pandemic to make permanent, meaningful changes to their businesses. Questions like these will be discovered at the The Year Ahead Summit, sponsored by Invest Qatar.”
Shai Weiss, CEO, Virgin Atlantic Limited said, “Recov-ering from the pandemic will take a bit of time but we are now more hopeful towards 2022 on the back of better news with respect to Omicron (as in UK the cases have gone down), changes to the restriction in travel have been removed in the UK and this gives us indi-cation this year will be better than the year 2020 and 2021.”
Addressing the summit Falguni Nayar, founder and CEO of Nykaa, one of India’s largest online wellness and beauty brands talked about the com-pany’s remarkable growth, the successful IPO journey and discussed the future of e-commerce, and what it’s like to take on the giants in the space amid an explosion of online shopping.
She said, “Indian capital markets were looking to invest in tech led companies because there is a clear growth path for companies that are using tech-nologies to grow their busi-nesses and the pace of growth they have experienced is far higher than the traditional com-panies or businesses. "
She added, Nykaa thinks the sustainability of business is very important and we have built a business in a sustainable manner that is going to stay for the long run. In a COVID impacted year (year ended March 31) we gained 35 percent.
David M. Rubenstein, Co-Founder and Co-Chairman, The Carlyle Group (private asset giant) discussed the market this year and the federal reserve interest rates. He said, “We have to live with inflation for a while, it is not going to be as bad as it was in the 70s but as long as we have COVID-19 and supply chain problems it is going to stay with us.”
The summit delivered a 360-degree view of the most vital topics facing every executive in the coming year.
From ongoing geopolitical uncertainty to the next generation of cyber security challenges to the radically changing nature of work in the age of AI, Bloomberg’s data-driven briefing created a critical roadmap for the greatest opportu-nities – and risks – ahead and beyond.
