What they crave

ENAR

Following the roundtable discussion on Manufacturing, we quizz the chief executive officers of two high-profile companies that are adding value to the real economy of Lebanon: cloud infrastructure component maker Multilane in high-tech manufacturing, and paints producer Sipes International, a stalwart player in the chemicals sector. With all the infrastructure shortcomings of Lebanon, fulfillment of one practical want would set these industrialists’ minds onto steeper growth: the implementation of dedicated manufacturing zones or “special economic zones” (SEZs) as building blocks of a real-economy industrial ecosystem. Chief executive officer of Multilane, Fadi Daou, sums up how he perceives the fundamental problem of manufacturing in Lebanon. “All the existing laws in our system center around a consumer industry and none of them focus on the export sector,” he says. Like approximately 90 percent of systemic industrial manufacturing problems, this battle over the creation of industrial zones or SEZs is nothing new but