Abu Dhabi: Abu Dhabi’s Department of Economic Development (ADDED) has officially launched a new business centre on Sunday in the presence of the department’s undersecretary Mohammed Omar Abdullah and a number of senior ADDED officials.
The opening of the business centre is probably “one of the most important initiatives put out by the Department of Economic Development,” said Abdullah.
The Abu Dhabi Business Centre allows business people and investors to electronically issue or renew commercial licenses from the various governmental entities which the ADDED is currently linked to. The Centre also provides support to businesses by offering consultations to companies and investors in Abu Dhabi, in addition to providing customers with information about potential commercial activities they could take part in.
The electronic transition is considered to be a great time saver. If all the right documents are available, a licence renewal would take as much as 10 minutes, Abdullah said. However, when a third party is involved, a new licence would take no more than three working days.
Ali Fahad Al Nuaimi, Director of Trade Relations at the Commercial Affairs Division at the ADDED, said that it’s a huge cut down on time compared to what used to take up to six days and sometimes weeks to get processed.
The ADDED also hopes that the business centre will provide the right business environment to position Abu Dhabi as a premium hub for investment and for attracting business people.
“The private sector contributes significantly to the local economy positively impacting the emirates GDP with a 6.5 per cent increase in 2012 based on preliminary estimates,” he said.
The expectations are for the centre to increase the number of commercial licences processed by 10 per cent, he added. Last year, the ADDED had issued around 86,000 licences.
Since May of last year, the ADDED has partnered with eight different governmental entities to process work electronically. “The plan is to have nine new entities on board by the end of this year,” Al Nuaimi told reporters, which means almost 90 per cent of the work will be done online. “By the end of the second quarter of 2014, we’re hoping to have another 28 governmental entities on board, whose work makes up the 10 per cent left.”
Al Nuaimi explained that the transition to the electronic process becomes mandatory once it’s been put into effect. At the same time, the ADDED’s business centre is developing an e-inspection initiative which enables inspectors to enter all the required data during their inspection onto their iPad, in real time, to finalise the licensing.
Today, the ADDED has 19 branches in the emirate of Abu Dhabi in which all of the new e-services are available.
