Bahrain Welcomes Foreign Scale-Up Companies For Start-Up Collaborations

From Zairina Zainudin MANAMA (Bahrain), Dec 14 (Bernama) -- The Bahrain Economic Development Board (EDB) is encouraging international scale-up companies to leverage on the kingdom's rapidly-growing start-up community to reap the potential collaborations that offer tremendous growth opportunities. EDB Managing Director, Dr Simon Galpin, said Bahrani start-ups will strive further if they can be planted into other start-up communities like what Singapore, Hong Kong and Malaysia had. "At EDB, what we are trying to do is to encourage our start-ups to look at markets beyond Bahrain and I think South-East Asia is a good accessible market for them. "We are also encouraging Malaysian scale-up companies that have already conquered the domestic market or maybe a few Association of South-East Asian Nations markets, to consider Bahrain as the next stop and a platform to access the wider Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC)," he said. Galpin said this at a special session with the media, conducted by the EDB here recently. EDB is a public agency responsible for attracting investments into the kingdom and supporting initiatives that enhance the investment climate. For funding, Galpin said, foreign companies could leverage on InvestED, an event aimed at encouraging some of high network individuals, asset management firms, financial institutions to diverse their investments away from traditional pattern and invest in start-ups. "If we can really grow that angel investors and venture capital base, this could be interesting for Malaysian scale-ups that are looking to get additional funding to enable them to access the GCC market," he said. Bahrain is one of the most diversified economies in the Gulf region and was the first of the six GCC countries to pioneer a number of important non-oil activities in the region, for instance, financial services. In June 2016, a total of US$100 million (US$1 = RM4.41) fund aimed at boosting liquidity on the Bahrain bourse was launched by Securities & Investment Co, one of the premier wholesale banks in West Asia and North Africa. This followed a number of initiatives in prior months aimed at enhancing local capital markets. These included the introduction of the Bahrain Islamic Index, GCC's first syariah-compliant index and the Real Estate Investment Trusts rules and the offering of Bahraini government bonds and Treasury bills. -- BERNAMA