Word: dubai
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...achieving its world-class ambitions. Fifty-dollars-a-barrel oil has hit the airline hard: it has instituted a wide-scale hiring freeze and delayed starting service to San Francisco and other U.S. cities. The neighborhood is getting crowded as well: the government of Abu Dhabi?next door to Dubai?has just launched not one but two carriers: Etihad Airlines and low-fare Gulf Traveller. The emirate of Sharjah last year started Air Arabia. Doha-based Qatar Airlines, meanwhile, is improving and expanding. Then there is the reality that Dubai is in the middle of a volatile region...
...Still, Emirates executives point out that Dubai?and the airline itself?is a tolerant, multicultural bastion, with English as the common language. "With more than 100 nationalities working here, and an open, self-critical way of doing business, we're not even an Arab airline," says executive vice president Gaith Al Gaith. And it's not as if Emirates shies away from its associations with the U.S.: it slapped a 20-story picture of the Statue of Liberty on a Dubai skyscraper last summer to advertise its New York flights...
...Dubai, the airline and its base at the airport?which is undergoing a $4 billion expansion?are just part of a bigger plan. They fit into the "superlative" strategy of the ruling Maktoum family. The tiny emirate on the coast of the Persian Gulf?once a significant trading hub?is now spending billions of dollars to become the world's high-end playground. And getting Emirates' brand known worldwide is part of that plan: last year the airline spent $150 million to buy the naming rights for a new 60,000-seat stadium for the popular London soccer team Arsenal...
...Flanagan knows better than most how far he?and his airline?has come in the past quarter-century. Today, he points out, Dubai is as close to the center of the world as a passenger can get. "Emirates needs only one stop to get you anywhere," says Flanagan. Of the world's top 50 airports, so far Emirates flies to 15. That's not enough for him. He intends to spend the next few years getting Emirates Airlines to take you to the rest?in style...
...TIME Global Business, which was launched in our U.S. edition in 2001, will introduce you each month to the companies and the people who are reshaping the global economy. In addition to our story on China's rainmakers, this month's section includes a look at Emirates Airlines, the Dubai-based carrier that has grown into the world's fifth most profitable airline?and is redefining first-class luxury in the air. (Room service? On a plane?) For his first column on investing in Asia, William Green took himself off to Bombay, the heart of India's stock-market boom...