Doha: Qatar Development Bank (QDB) took part in the annual start-ups and entrepreneurship conference “The Art of Innovation: Innovative Startups And its importance” held in Moscow via video conferencing.

During his speech at a session entitled “The Economy of Solitude: How Companies evolved to face a new reality”, Abdulaziz bin Nasser Al Khalifa, CEO of Qatar Development Bank, highlighted Qatar’s strategy to confront the economic impacts of the new corona epidemic (Covid-19) on SMEs , noting the full cooperation between the various government’s departments in the State to provide an integrated package of support for private sector companies to deal with the pandemic.

Speaking about how the Qatari private sector companies deal with the new changes and conditions related to the spread of the pandemic, Al Khalifa noted that the training and advisory services provided by QDB during the current crisis were extremely important, along with financing services, in the companies resilience to the repercussions of the pandemic , where QDB had provided a series of programmes and consulting services to train companies through online platforms on dealing with various aspects related to the impact of the pandemic.

He said that QDB had issued a guide for small and medium-sized companies as a reference on how to deal with the pandemic and its impact on various aspects of business.

It also activated a special operations room to support small and medium-sized companies and support supply chains for the private sector to ensure business and production continuity to meet local demand and to achieve self-sufficiency in strategic commodities .

He praised the efforts of the national factories during the current crisis, and their great role in supplying the market with various necessary products and materials, besides the role of the factories in covering the State’s needs of basic medical materials such as sterilizers, masks, and personal safety equipment dedicated to medical frameworks, and the rapid response of local factories and raising their capacity in a short time.

Qatar ranked 29th globally and second in the Arab world in the Global Competitiveness Report issued by the World Economic Forum in 2019, in addition to the fourth rank in the index of financing small and medium companies and 12th globally according to the entrepreneurial culture index of the same report that included 141 countries.