According to the latest research by leading consumer intelligence company, D/A, confidence continues to climb in the UAE across the board, with notable increases in economic confidence after recording significant declines in Q1 and now reaching the second highest sentiment recording in the series. Fears of geopolitical events and tax reforms were short-lived and the outlook continues in positive growth.
The economic shift was most prominent as the huge declines of Jan are well and truly surpassed. April recorded a 4.% increase in economic confidence leaving the combined national confidence rating in the 80 percentile, another all-time high for the series in UAE in April.
The employment index, also increased in sentiment continuing the reversal of a 2 month fall into January since November 2021, this unexpected rise in confidence reflects consumers’ long-term optimism about the UAE economy. The rise of +1.3% is a good result after March’s 6.6% uplift.
Paul Kelly, Managing Partner, D/A, said: “The turbulent trend line continues for the GCC’s second largest economy as we see yet another dramatic spike in confidence across all 3 indices, reminiscent of the same time last year”.
The largest economy, Saudi Arabia contributed to the overall GCC decline in confidence in April with a combined indices decline of -5.3%. Moving further away from the net positive position.
Confidence in the economy dropped by -4.6% in Apri, largely driven by externalities including sharper inflationary pressure and supply chain constraints.
Employment confidence, meanwhile, recorded a slight increase of 0.8%. And remains in the high 80 percentile readings, very high confidence despite the lower than average business sentiment and declining economic confidence.
“With continued declines in the private sector now increasing, despite positive oil movements in the first quarter. Although non-oil gross domestic profit has increased alongside oil prices in the last quarter, confidence in the private sector still remains below net positive and in April dropped again to 26.8% (-3.9%)” concluded Kelly.
Sila, developed by D/A, is an Arabic-language AI tool created to gain insight and create strategies that drive brand growth across MENA and beyond. As the regional expert in Arabic consumer intelligence, D/A combines the speed and depth of their unique technology with expert strategy and analyst teams that bring human value to big data.
D/A uses natural language processing models in 21 Arabic dialects to understand sentiment and emotion without translating content first. This enables high accuracy and even more insight than currently available in the region.
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