Zoho announced that in the five years since starting its operations in the UAE, which serves as its Middle East and Africa headquarters, the company has grown 10 times in the country, with a 5-year CAGR of 60%. On the sidelines of Zoholics Dubai, the annual user conference of the company, Zoho’s CEO and Co-founder, Sridhar Vembu, also announced investment of AED 100 million for expansion in the country.
In 2022, Zoho grew by 45% in the UAE, which was the second-highest growing country globally. It has also doubled its employee base in the UAE as well as across the MEA region in the past year, by hiring locally as per its ‘transnational localism’ policy of being locally rooted while staying globally connected. The partner network in the country grew by 50% in 2022, helping Zoho serve its customers better.
“As part of our transnational localism strategy, when we expand into a region, we want to give back to the local community and be rooted in the local culture as we grow,” said Sridhar Vembu. “Over the past five years, we have invested in local hiring, growing our partner network, adding Arabic support in our products, and integrating with local payment gateways to adapt our solutions for the local market. We will continue to invest in growing our footprints in the country through hirings, upskilling programmes, localisation of products, integrating our solutions with local vendors, and partnering with organisations to help local businesses in their digitalisation efforts.”
Zoho has partnered with various organisations such as Department of Economy and Tourism (DET) and Dubai Culture in order to make enterprise technology available to businesses of all sizes. It has also partnered with educational institutes like Manipal Academy of Higher Education (MAHE) and Emirates Academy of Hospitality Management (EAHM) to offer upskilling courses. Since 2020, Zoho has helped over 3500 SMEs gain access to its cloud technology through various partnerships, investing AED 20 million in wallet credits. It also invested AED 4.5 million in upskilling initiatives for imparting digital literacy to over 200+ students and 300+ companies.
“Because of the global economic conditions, more and more companies are moving towards digitalisation and choosing unified platforms that help them break data silos, and bring forth contextual real-time insights that enable them to make quick decisions and be nimble to adapt to changing market conditions. Zoho has its own technology stack that has been built from ground up through relentless R&D over 26 years. We offer a unified platform for all business needs from customer experience and marketing to finance and enterprise collaboration, with our apps being customisable, integrable and extendible. This makes Zoho an ideal choice for businesses of all sizes,” added Vembu.
The top products leading Zoho’s growth in the UAE are Zoho One (a unified platform of over 50 products), Zoho Books (FTA-approved VAT-compliant accounting software), Zoho CRM (customer experience platform), Zoho Workplace (enterprise collaboration platform), and Zoho Creator (low-code development platform). The industries from where the most demand is coming are IT services, wellness/fitness, real estate, manufacturing and retail sectors.
Popular Pizza outlet, Papa Johns has been using Zoho’s solutions (Zoho People Plus, Zoho Expense and Zoho Creator) to streamline their HR (staff attendance), expense and payroll management across 70+ outlets in the UAE, Saudi Arabia and other countries in the Middle East region. “We finalised Zoho after evaluating several well-known platforms available in the market. It is user-friendly, easy to customise based on our unique needs and compatible with almost all the devises and other software. It also provides a robust security system. Its scalability is amazing as we can continue to expand and grow across the region, while using the same software. I must also say that the team is very supportive and always available when we need them,” said Albrey James, Head of HR & Administration, Papa Johns.
