Top 100 Powerful Arabs 2014

The region’s most authoritative business list is here…

Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Alsaud, founder and chairman of Saudi’s Kingdom Holding Company, once again tops the third annual list of the world’s 100 most powerful Arabs, published by Gulf Business magazine.

Despite a spate of controversies, the Prince reaped some hefty profits, notably from his investment in social networking platform Twitter.

Emirates airline and Emirates NBD chairman Sheikh Ahmed again ranks second, followed in third place by Khalid Al-Falih, who resides over Saudi oil firm Aramco, thought to be the world’s most valuable unlisted company.

This year’s list saw 21 new entrants, with two of the new entries featuring within the top 10 – UAE minister of state and MD of Dubai World Expo 2020 Reem Al Hashimy and Saudi female driver Aziza Al Yousef.

Methodology

Gulf Business assembled a team of experts from within Motivate broad business division, including the Gulf Business team itself, which has decades of experience working with the Arab business community and reporting on regional news.

The team looked at the events of 2013 and judged each individual case on power merit.

We have included business people of Arab descent from all over the world. We weighted our criteria on a points system across the following spheres of influence:

– Financial capital
– Human capital
– Expansion plans
– Personal fame levels.

In general, Gulf Business has excluded politicians and royalty, unless the contenders have a strong leaning towards business activity.

The Gulf Business Arab Power 100 is intended to be an inspirational representation of some of the Arab world’s greatest achievers and future makers.