The Ministry of SMEs and Startups announced it will hold the K-Business Day in the Middle East 2024 export consultation session on Feb. 27 in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, and on Feb. 29 in Dubai, the UAE, in collaboration with the Korea Federation of Small and Medium Enterprises. This initiative aims to support promising small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in entering the Middle Eastern market.
This event is the first follow-up support under the Framework Cooperation Program being pursued by the Ministry of SMEs and Startups and the Saudi Investment Ministry since December last year to enhance the entry and business support of domestic SMEs in Saudi Arabia. It also serves as the second follow-up action of the economic cooperation MOU signed between the Ministry of SMEs and Startups and the UAE Ministry of Economy during President Yoon Suk-yeol’s state visit to the UAE in January last year, witnessed by the leaders of both countries.
At the export consultation session, 20 promising SMEs in high-demand sectors such as beauty, food, and consumer goods due to the Hallyu (Korean wave) phenomenon will participate. They will engage in one-on-one meetings with approximately 140 buyers from the surrounding Middle Eastern region (79 from Riyadh and 61 from Dubai).
Through preliminary consultations, CellbyCell, a cosmetics ingredient company, is negotiating a long-term sales contract with a distribution company in Kuwait, and IONPOLIS, a bathroom products manufacturer, is preparing to sign an MOU with a UAE distributor, laying the groundwork for their entry into the Middle East.
Notably, the event will also tentatively implement a digital transformation policy for the export consultation session through collaboration with large corporations. Utilizing the real-time translation function of the Samsung Electronics Galaxy S24 provided free of charge through collaboration, the applicability of related policies will be assessed. Additionally, the possibility of using documents generated during the consultation session as electronic documents in the future will be examined through Naver’s Clova OCR technology.