Mohammad Ali, General Manager of the Saudi Sudan bank spoke about the effect of the international crisis on Sudan and his opinion on its causes and effect on the global economy. Finally, the GM shed some light on his bank, its expansion, and future prospects.
Answering a question about how much the global crisis affects Sudan’s banking sector he explained that “the crisis will affect most world economies and it will have some effect on Sudan, as the oil prices have severely dropped. Additionally, the real estate and the exports sectors have been touched too, not to forget the level of the foreign investment. Fortunately, the real estate prices are holding up. Nevertheless, the degree of the crisis fallout depends largely on the openness of the economy, its size and the strength of its financial institution.” Concerning Sudan’s economy, the country has a lot of potential in many different sectors; however due to the recent oil price reduction reflected positively on the different sectors like agriculture which has been neglected for a long time. “But now with the current oil prices we hope that we will turn back to the agricultural sector, in which we have a big comparative advantage, of land, water and know how,” he added.
Mohamed Ali also gave his opinion concerning the global crisis and its causes and effects on the global economy, saying: “The definition of the crisis itself is still ambiguous and the causes are not fully fleshed out yet, but we can say that in our part of the world we have been more stringent in our application of the rules and regulations that the West have formulated and have recently ignored, which has led to the current crisis. Therefore, I believe that applying these rules has greatly helped us in minimizing the fallouts of the crisis and all players in all markets should follow them. Especially, that we all live in a global economy that is closely linked, consequently any recession that hit the developed countries will negatively affect us. Therefore, we could not claim that we are in a better situation than the west during this crisis.”
Finally, the GM shed some light on his bank, its expansion, and future prospects saying, “We are a middle sized bank with 14 branches, eight of them in the capital and the rest all over the country. We are currently planning to extend in other large cities and opening six more branches, gradually and prudently.
The bank is a joint venture of Sudanese and Saudi investors. The main shareholders are Saudi airlines and the Central bank of Sudan and other public corporations. We have a 30 million US dollar capital, and we achieved a seven million dollars profit in 2008 and we hope that we will achieve and even better profit by next year.
