Ms. Pfeiffer, you’ve just been to Dubai for two months. What were you doing there? A colleague from HR and myself have been helping out with setting up our new TechCenter. It’s not a finished office we’ve rented, more a building shell. The interior work was initially handled from Germany but of course there’s a lot to sort out at local level before the office is really up and running. That is our job.

Can you give us some examples? Our activities range from helping employees who are relocating to Dubai find apartments, organizing service providers and cooperating with the authorities to purchasing stationery. There are also accounting and finance matters to organize. We are setting up over 30 workplaces, around half of which will initially be used by staff permanently based here. Colleagues already working in Dubai at the Group representative office are also moving in with us. Here there are mostly a lot of little things that need to be sorted out to ensure the office administration functions reliably.

How much progress have you made? We’re generally making good progress. Dubai is a melting pot of different cultures, a cosmopolitan, booming and yet safe city. It is a very interesting place to work and of course we prepared well before we went to avoid breaking any rules. Patience is an important factor, for example. In particular anything that needs an official stamp can take a while. So you have to stay on the ball. But the delays are manageable and so we are optimistic that we will soon be able to address the whole region from the new TechCenter.

Will you be spending much more time in Dubai yourself? A few more trips are planned over the next few weeks. After that I will go there when necessary, but I will mainly support the TechCenter from Germany.

How did you come by this assignment? I support other international sales and representative offices of ThyssenKrupp Technologies and therefore have the required experience. It’s partly about observing the market and other classic marketing and sales tasks - activities that are generally part of my work. To this extent I think and hope that I have made a valuable contribution to the launch of our new headquarters in the Middle East.