Multinationals face pressure to relocate headquarters to Saudi Arabia

Wow, that could also be the UAE to a letter.

> King Abdullah University of Science and Technology near Jeddah (new world-class university with the best brains money can buy, except it's not)

I don't often get the chance to tell this, but I was - through a series of strange circumstances - briefly involved with the initial set-up of that university and I got so many war stories out of it.

This included:

* The contractors built the on-campus housing without drainage (...although money was allocated for drains, it somehow went "missing"). There was a rainstorm right before campus opening and most of the housing was destroyed.

* During the same rainstorm very expensive IBM supercomputer was partially destroyed. It transpired contractors had drilled through the damp-proof coursing above whilst fixing a light.

* A number graduate students were arrested in the first few months for fraternising outside of campus (inside the campus most morality laws didn't apply, but once you left you were on your own)

* One of the chemistry labs did a roaring trade in sid (the local arabic for hooch) amongst the faculty and staff

* Getting absolutely anything done relied on "wasta", which kind of translates as "clout", but encompasses a bunch of things including nepotism, who you know, and your skin color (Saudi, like much of the Middle East, suffers from significant racism. Faculty and staff who looked Indian or Pakistani had a very rough time of it).

Yes to all and no to all too. The reality in the country is that all is forbidden and all comonplace at the same time. You will find laws saying women (or men) can or cannot do X but then you will also meet woman on the street doing X openly. The country is dominated by class and priviledge levels. The laws apply differently to different people. So the best question to ask is who will you be working for? Who is your employer/sponsor/protector going to be? What are thier chosen rules?

DEI = Diversity, equity and inclusion.

KSA= Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.

(Just in case others have a hard time, it look me a moment to parse KSA as not “knowledge, skills, abilities.”)

I think we all know the answer to that.

Saudis will get special treatment because they have money and oil. Their barbaric treatment of women and decades of financing terrorism (Wahhabism) will be ignored.

DEI is mostly about profit. It’s profitable in the US to virtue signal via DEI but not in KSA.

> I've been taking many DEI trainings at Google. I'm wondering how that will work at a Google Riyadh office.

Google is already hypocritical enough to virtue signal DEI stuff and then discriminating anyway in the US.

I would expect Google in the KSA to just plainly play by the local rules.

Small potatoes for the Saudis. They don’t expect either to hold high positions.

Except multinationals have to convince people to move there, and why would I do that? If by expense, you mean to higher salaries and bonuses I’ll require to live there, then yes.

Multinationals operating in the Middle East all put their HQs in Dubai for a reason. Just about everything in Saudi, including things like getting a business visa to enter the country, is a nightmare if you don't have the right connections (wasta).

Thanks for this - very useful!

I can confirm this works with Opera, too. Not with drag and drop, but with the "load unpacked" button in developer mode.

People who think fossil fuels == making your personal automobile go vroom are willfully ignorant. Good luck growing food, transporting it to where you live, manufacturing pretty much anything or heating your home with an electric car.

The majority of new vehicles being sold today are still internal combustion based. Given they will likely last for at least 2 decades, there will be plenty of demand for petroleum in (say) 10 years :(

I have to call BS on that announcement. I am very sure that the SA government will continue to do business with microsoft, lockheed martin and a thousand other "international companies" with regional headquarters outside the kingdom. There may be a translation issue. I suspect they mean to say all companies must maintain an office in the kingdom, the HQ for the "region" that is SA.

Most companies treat the Middle East as appendages of Europe (EMEA == Europe, Middle East and Africa).

Good luck getting staff to move from London, Dublin, Paris, Amsterdam etc headquarters to the soul-crushing wasteland that is Saudi Arabia. Dubai, perhaps, but Saudi? Most would resign outright, and I can’t blame them.