Dubai International Financial Centre (DIFC) will continue targeting China for future growth despite its economic meltdown last month, its governor Essa Kazim has said.
A team of DIFC officials visited Beijing and Shanghai last week to detail the free zone’s plans to triple in size by 2024.
China, the DIFC said in July when announcing its ten-year expansion strategy, is a key target market in plans to increase assets under management from $10.4 billion to $250 billion, grow its balance sheet from $65 billion to $400 billion and hike up total number of financial companies operating within the free zone from 382 to 1,000.
The China stockmarket crash in August could have threatened to put the DIFC’s plans off course – but DIFC deputy CEO Arif Amiri insisted at the time that it was “business as usual as far as our value proposition to China is concerned.”