Dubai's economic chief tells investors: steady growth, not headlines

Dubai is not selling investors on a record-breaking quarter. Hadi Badri, chief executive of the Dubai Economic Development Corporation, says the emirate is playing for steady growth rather than headlines, and that its record of absorbing shocks is what he puts in front of capital.

The corporation sits within the emirate's Department of Economy and Tourism. Badri spoke at Bloomberg Invest Dubai.

His argument turns on how the city handles pressure. Dubai came through the global financial crisis, the COVID-19 pandemic and the difficulties of 2026, and each time came out stronger than it went in, he said. Confidence, on that reading, is not announced. It is earned by coping. Badri called the economy anti-fragile: a system that improves when it is tested rather than one that merely survives the test.

The 2026 tally he set against that claim was concrete. The city received 80 million visitors. It added 1.3 million residents. And it registered 600,000 new businesses. Arrivals on that scale supply the customers a young company needs before it has sold anything, and the residents supply the workforce to serve them.

Logistics, financial services and investment banking are the sectors the corporation intends to double down on. Health and longevity sit alongside them as newer areas of opportunity. Founders in that field are looking at Dubai from around the world and want to get there fast, Badri said. The corporation's role, as he described it, is to roll out the red carpet for them.

Growth targets for the priority sectors are pitched at low double digits, year on year. Ambitious, and short of a promise that any single sector will change shape overnight.

He drew a line between arriving at number one and staying there. Protecting a leading position in a sector matters as much as reaching it, he said. A ranking won and then lost is not a strategy, and the targets are set with defence in mind as much as ascent.

Dubai is widening its bets at the same time. Longevity, artificial intelligence and robotics are joining the agenda while logistics and finance stay at the centre of it. Badri said the emirate has shown no ceiling and can make the impossible possible — the kind of line Gulf officials reach for often, though here it arrived attached to visitor, resident and licence counts.

Taken together, the numbers describe a city adding people and companies at a pace that puts the administrative side of growth under as much strain as the physical one. Badri's emphasis on clearing the way for arriving founders, and on holding rankings already secured, points at the same conclusion: demand is not the constraint.

That framing matters for the capital being courted. A founder weighing a move needs permits, premises and customers who show up before the company does. Tourists and residents arriving by the million are the demand side of that ledger, and the pitch is that the base already exists and the gap between a decision and an operating business can be closed quickly. Rival Gulf hubs are chasing the same founders with capital and light-touch rules of their own, which makes speed of execution the differentiator.

The measure Badri keeps returning to is narrower than any slogan: low double-digit growth in the sectors Dubai has chosen to push, and the discipline to hold the positions it already leads.