New Middle East business website BI-ME launches

UAE. The Dubai-based innovation centre Strategy Garden launched its first major media venture today, a new website that will consolidate a wealth of Middle East market information, news and analysis into a single portal.

The site, BusinessIntelligence-Middle East at www.bi-me.com covers all major industry sectors: from FMCG and retail, to luxury goods, duty free, oil and gas, utilities, real estate and mall developments, IT, telecoms, industrials, autos, finance, tourism and services.

The concept of BI-ME is cut through the mass of news releases and trade information that is already available in the press and to package business data and opportunities so that they can be searched in an intuitive and relevant way. One major feature of the site is the NONAV (Knowledge-based Navigation) search tool that enables subscribes to mine deep into the site for reports specific to certain sectors and certain market parameters – for example, market access, market environment or consumers.

BI-ME will provide intelligent and incisive reading, analysing the recent past of Middle East business, current performance and its future directions. For instant news and business intelligence, it offers a website that is updated seven days a week and a weekly e-Newsletter (BusinessIntelligence-Middle East), which is free to registered users.

The company said the business model of partially free pages, and partially subscriber pages and reports, is targeted to generate a strong business profile of readers and decision-makers that will be attractive to advertisers.

BI-ME Managing Editor Trevor Lloyd-Jones commented: "The site empowers businesses to help themselves. We realised we were launching into a market that is crowded with business newspapers and websites. All our research told us that there was no shortage of information in the market. But there is shortage of time of the user and a shortage of tools and reports that are accessible in terms of searching, cost and their real relevance to business decisions.”

BI-ME and Strategy Garden - the parent company that has other marketing and strategy consulting activities as well as brand development projects for the Middle East - is also planning a series of premium market reports that will be available to subscribers. These will commence this month with other reports scheduled to be launched covering: Consumers & Markets, Inflation Study, a Special Iraq Report and the BI-ME 200 Report, which will profile all of the Middle East’s top companies in unprecedented detail.

The BI-ME site is organised into 16 country sections: Bahrain, Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Libya, Morocco, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Tunisia, UAE and Yemen. In addition there are 11 business sectors, four sub-regions of the Middle East and three market parameters that are used for searching market reports: market environment, consumers and market potential (including market size).

Subscribers have the option to use one or more countries and they have immediate access to over 200 market reports or NONAV reports online. They can even personalise their own home page and subscription packages start from US$15 per month. The company is also offering a free no-commitment 15 day trial subscription for its launch period.

Lloyd-Jones added: "It will be great if the region starts to view and use our site this week, but the important thing is that managers know that it exists. All of us at some point or another will experience a particular challenge or we will require some critical business information. Now there is a place for everyone to turn to.”