Riyadh (Saudi Arabia) – The LEAP23 conference, which is being held in the capital of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia this week, is an opportunity for French entrepreneurs to set out to conquer little-known markets but with significant development potential.
What are their expectations, their vision of the tech market in Saudi Arabia and Arab countries? The point with three of them.
“It’s my very first trip to this country, and so for the moment I’m discovering” says Christelle Curcio, founder of the company alegria.group, which trains professionals in No Code tools.
His company, which advertises clients such as Qonto, Veepee and even L’Oréal, is present in Europe and Mexico. This first stay in Saudi Arabia is therefore a way to smell the development potential of the country.
“The Kingdom needs to train en masse in the field of STEM”
“I have already understood that the Kingdom needs mass training in the STEM field. But this is more of an opportunity for me. We in France already have a lot of demand, and the market is growing. “.
Still, the digital transformation shift started with Saudi Arabia’s Vision 2030 plan could allow it to develop its No Code training and support activity. The country is sorely lacking in skills in the field of IT development. The promise of training in software creation tools without necessarily having to code should therefore logically appeal.
“My job is to break down the mental barrier of professionals who have to ask a dev to move a project forward,” she says. “But we are also training the future generation of No Code makers”.
“In the discourse I hear here, there is the desire to open up through culture”
Very first trip to the region for Chloé Jarry as well. Founder of Lucid Realities Studio, she sees in the Saudi market a potential for developing her virtual reality content creation activity for museums and cultural establishments.
“Above all, I need to understand the local market and the expectations of people here. In the discourse I hear here, there is the desire to open up through culture”. Something to interest this specialist in the production and distribution of virtual reality experiences, whether with a VR headset or simply a smartphone.
“This is an opportunity to see how dated physical events are”
“For me, going through here means exploring another potential business area,” explains Vincent Bruneau, founder of the company SparkUp, who is on his third trip to the country. “This type of event is an opportunity to meet people but also to see how dated physical events are. They have to be changed”.
SparkUp makes a point of streaming hybrid events in very high quality, which bring together a large number of participants, without latency, via the WebRTC protocol.
“At each tech conference I notice the same thing: attention has become very difficult to capture, everyone is on their smartphone. So face-to-face must be increased, and remote must offer interactivity with Q&A, interaction. But the sinews of war is real time. We have less than 2 seconds of latency”.
He has applied to be a speaker at the event, which allows him to gain visibility on the local market, but also to be noticed by tech giants, such as Zoom or Microsoft, who could in one way or another. another to ship its technology to term.