In-depth Interview Participant (E-1) Interview Date: 03/04/2016
Interviewer: Shinta Dewi Komalasari Interview type: Face to Face
Interview Duration: 14 minutes and 7 seconds
(The first question about the details of the company and what they are doing and providing are intentionally not scripted here to maintain the confidentiality of the respondent)
Why did you start the company?
Which mostly based on my personal problems… So I have been living in Qatar all my lives. We used to struggle finding a good doctor, may be because we don’t know much about the doctor as much as we would like to know. For instant you go to one person and you ask him how much he know about the doctor. Her would answer that he is a specialist doctor in this…but he doesn’t know anything about anything else. He doesn’t know about other languages that he speaks, where did he go to school, whether he has American credentials, etc. The second thing is because I were in the university, and this was actually my university project at …… University. And then we launched it as a student project and then we got a lot of intention from press and then we launched it as a company. So, it is not intended to be a company, we just started it as a course project and then our professor and faculty encourage us to launch it as a company.
Given that the economy is largely hydrocarbon-driven, in your opinion, what policy measures are needed to encourage the youth of the country to seriously consider taking up entrepreneurship as a career option?
I think, interns of regulations, Qatar still need to do a lot of things. I think the Ministry of Economic and Commerce, they are going to a good direction. They have made
restriction a lot easier for people to start a company. For instance, a year ago, we should have two hundred thousand real as a minimum capital. Now is no longer a requirement.
But now … banks have their own restriction. So now MEC is not asking for the two hundred thousands but bank is asking for a minimum requirement deposit. So QNB might ask you thirty thousand, Masreq Rayyan might ask you twenty thousand, so they have their own. So standardization would help.
All these information about regulation is still not that clear. It is very ambiguity at the moment. People will tell you different things and regulation is keep changing every now and then. So .. there are a lot of ambiguity on what people need to do, what they don’t need to do. So I think if this could change, it would help a lot.
The other requirement is like having a trade license. In order to have the trade license, you need to have an office space and then you need at least a year long lease of that.
Which is a huge pain … because it’s really expensive for start-up company to get at lease and office space. So incubator in this country are helping us with that. But I think it would make it easier if we could get away of actually having a problem with office space… or at least not a year-long lease item. If this is a start-up company, you don’t have so much capital in the beginning, you are struggling to get your revenue, and you struggling to earn money… so that would help a lot.
So to summarize the point…from ministry point of view, you making the regulation are easy would help! And actually making the information more accessible, so people will
know what need to be done. Because everything is quite ambiguite at the moment. You don’t’s know if this low still applicable or not.
What are the challenges did you face when building your company at the beginning?
First at the beginning, we had an issue of finding a partner, a local partner. I was fortune enough that I found my friends back in university and joined them. But, I am sure many people in Qatar do face this problem because in Qatar we need a local partner, and a lot of expat coming to the country they don’t know someone that they can make as partner…
so that would be a challenge
Are you aware that the Ministry of Economy and Commerce (Under Law no 13 of 2000 as amended by Law no 1 of 2010) MAY PERMIT foreign investors to own more than 49%
and up to 100% of a company in specified sectors called “Priority Sectors”, namely business consulting, technical services, information technology, cultural, sports and leisure services, distribution services, agriculture, manufacturing, health, tourism, development and exploitation of natural resources, and energy & mining?
Yes, I heard about it but it’s for a very special case. It’s extremely hard to get to that.
Like it’s not as easy as you guess you go to ministry of Economy and Commerce and say that I am an IT company and they will say that you don’t need a Qatari partner. I
mean,… you need to put some strings on something like that… it’s extremely hard to do that.
And how about the challenges now … to grow your business?
Immigration is another issue. Getting people into the country, getting new visas and
everything … especially for new company. Finding talent locally is hard. So you need to get people from abroad, but to getting abroad is like these issues with their visas. So … it’s another challenge.
Law is ambiguous…lot of inefficiency. There are too many red tapes. If you gonna get anything approve …. It will just take you forever. So it slows down business a lot. If you need to go to MEC to get your trade license or adding business activity, it will take weeks or even sometimes months for getting it approved and it cost a lot of money on that.
Theoretically it should be done within one day, but in reality it’s not. So my point is … there is red tape in efficiency that can be improved a lot.
….The respondent is also tell the success stories of his business and the long term plan of the company ….(not written in this transcript for confidentiality reason).
Okay …. Thank you so much (respondent’s name) for participating… I think I have asked everything that I need to ask you. I will switch of the recording device now.