What could symbolise London more than Hamleys? More than a toy store, it is an iconic destination for millions of visitors, young and old, to the British capital. But from this December there will be a branch of Hamleys in Kuala Lumpur, the capital of my country, Malaysia.
It will join a series of British companies who have invested successfully in Malaysia, including James Dyson, your brilliant entrepreneur and inventor, who moved a lot of his manufacturing to my country in 2002.
But this is not a one way traffic. This week the Prime Minister of Malaysia has been in London to attend a ground breaking ceremony at the reconstruction of Battersea Power Station. After years of uncertainty, it is to become an exciting residential and retail complex, and the backers for the project are Malaysian.
Our two countries believe in the economic possibilities that each offers, and are increasing finding concrete expression for that belief. Last year David Cameron and our Prime Minister promised to double the value of bilateral trade between our countries to £8billion a year by 2016.
But this direct investment is only the beginning of the potential economic involvement between our two nations. London is, outside the Muslim world, the leading international centre for Islamic finance, a trillion pound business that is forecast to grow to £1.6 trillion within a couple of years. Britain has the largest Islamic banking sector outside the Middle East and Asia – 22 Shariah compliant banks or banks with Islamic windows, 12 more than the next largest – the USA.
And partnerships between the UK and Muslim world are growing. The UAE and UK Joint Economic Committee agreed to increase bilateral trade by 60% by 2015, and last year UK bilateral trade with Turkey reached £9.1 billion in 2011, with UK goods exports of £3.7 billion. Saudi Arabia is the second largest foreign investor in the UK and is the UK’s largest trading partner in the Middle East. The 200 joint ventures between the two countries have an estimated value of $US17.5bn.
This is not surprising. One quarter of the world’s population, 1.8 billion people, are Muslims and many of them live in some of the world’s fastest growing economies. For example, take the Halal sector – Halal is among the fastest growing global business in the world. The total value of the global Halal market is estimated at $2.3 trillion a year.
Muslim countries are young countries – within the 57 nation Organisation of Islamic Cooperation 40 per cent of the population is under the age of 25. The sense of optimism and possibility is endless.
Which is why this year I am bringing the World Islamic Economic Forum, an organisation of which I am Chairman, to London for the first time in its decade long history.
The WIEF is dedicated to the proposition that in these troubled and fast moving times, the best and most reliable way of building bridges between nations is through business cooperation. The continuing aftermath of the credit crunch in much of the world, challenges of income inquality, and finite resources, make it ever more important to cooperate if the 21st century is to be as transformative for the human race as the 20th
was.
And when we decided to hold our first ever meeting outside Muslim world, London was the obvious destination. First because of the bilateral trading ties between Malaysia and Britain. Secondly because the City of London understands and embraces the potential of Islamic finance. But perhaps most importantly because London is an outward looking City, a City that hosted the most successful Olympic Games of recent times, a City with the confidence to embrace its many immigrants and their cultures.
For nearly a decade, the World Islamic Economic Forum has been contributing to these debates, helping to build bridges between worlds. But although many Western business people and leaders have attended, we’ve always met in nations from the Islamic world.
This year, we decided that the time had come to meet in the West, to bring our message that there is more that unites the nations than divides them, to a non-Muslim country for the first time. We wanted to reach out in the most tangible sense to the West at this crucial time. And we believe actions speak louder than words – last year’s 8th WIEF struck deals worth an estimated £5.8billion.
What better place to hold a Conference – in October – at which 1,500 distinguished delegates from business and politics, led by David Cameron, Boris Johnson and Prime Minister Razak, will spend a few days discussing our common economic goals, and how two countries, two religions and two worlds can work and prosper together.