Information security a competitive advantage to Saudi business leaders

Information security a competitive advantage to Saudi business leaders

CEOs in Saudi Arabia view information security as a potential source of competitive advantage and critical to engender trust with key stakeholders, according to the results of the Saudi Arabia CEO Outlook report by KPMG.

The firm surveyed a range of top-level business leaders in the Kingdom with 64% of CEOs (up from 38% in the year before), believe that protecting customer data is important to enable the organisation to grow its customer base in the future. That said, 68% of CEOs feel their investments in improving customer experience has paid off as expected, up from 36%.

The report also surveyed the challenges on the labour market, and found that 46% of CEOs in Saudi Arabia, compared with 59% of the global CEOs believe that they face difficulties in finding the right talent. At the same time, two-thirds of the CEOs in the Kingdom are now more focused on embedding their hiring strategies into their growth targets and up-skilling the existing workforce, rather than recruiting new staff.

When preparing workforce 4.0, 68% of the CEOs in Saudi Arabia are channeling most of their investments into new technologies, compared to 32% who believe it is more important to invest in developing their workforce with the right digital capabilities, although the two do not need to be mutually exclusive.

Overall, KPMG found CEOs to be confident about their companies’ growth prospects, despite macro-economic headwinds and a relatively lower confidence in the direction of the global economy.

The CEO Outlook is based on the input of 50 CEOs in Saudi Arabia, compared with KPMG’s annual global survey amongst 1300 of the world’s leading CEOs and assesses some of the important international trends impacting Saudi Arabia and how companies can chart new business strategies for success over the next three years.

For more insights and findings, you may download the full report here: https://home.kpmg/content/dam/kpmg/sa/pdf/2020/agile-or-irrelevant.PDF