Keeping alight the spark

Lebanese industry has been dealt many a bad card in its recent history. Yet when the sector went through a five-year boom, with exports nearly doubling in value from $2.17 billion in 2006 to $4.059 billion in 2010, it seemed as if industry had finally found some playable hands. The sector could raise the stakes, throw out an ace or two, and show the banking, real estate and tourism sectors that industry was an equally important player at the country’s economic big-boys’ table. But the winning streak was not to last. The global financial crisis — which the sector had managed to bypass for a while — political uprisings throughout the region, and sluggish domestic economic growth all started to affect business in 2011, the second half in particular. In the words of the president of the Association of Lebanese Industrialists (ALI), Neemat Frem, “It was not a slowdown in