Late to the party

Late to the party

The $2 trillion global Halal industry is growing and companies in Southeast Asia are taking the lead in globalising halal standards. Where are the Middle Eastern companies in all of this?

April 5, 2011 2:22 by Precious de Leon

Malaysia-based International Halal Integrity Alliance has started drafting Halal standards to give Muslims businesses around the world a framework to regulate the estimated $2 trillion global industry.

The guidelines will cover the use of sharia-compliant pharmaceuticals, finance and processed food and is expected to be completed by yearend.

Kipp can’t help but think there’s a lost opportunity here for companies in the Middle East. Companies in the region are naturally operating under Halal practices albeit the absence of standardised methods.

So why aren’t companies in the Middle East (the seat of the religion) getting together to lead in drafting global Halal standards?

One of the first sectors to catch on to the Sharia-compliance is banking. A majority of the estimated $700 billion in assets of Islamic banks concentrated in the Middle East—for now at least.

The Islamic Banking market is gaining momentum outside of the region, however, as more financial institutions across the world are beginning to introduce Sharia-compliant banking products and services to serve the more than 1 billion Muslims living worldwide.

The Philippines government, for example, is endorsing a Muslim body seeking Middle East investors to help grow the country’s fledgling Islamic banking industry.

Pages: 1 2 3

Tags: Banking, gcc, Gulf, halal, investment, Malaysia, Middle East, Philippines, Sharia, UK

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1 Comment

Mamdooh Al-Radadi on April 6, 2011 4:34 am

I think that even in the Islamic banking area as you mention with all teh potential there is much room to grow.
Having worked last year in a leading Islamic Bank I see most of the Islamization of financial products and services takes forever to roll out and in many cases outsourced.
So let me say that again; Slow, no creativity to market such powerful product offerings, benchmarks are unrealistic in the shifting.

If were going to start looking at food items, then yes the far east rules in this area, although we are the Islamic capital.

Many factors cause this to happen and the first in my point of view is educating the customer on the benefits and ease of use, the only users are high profile companies..get the customers on board and watch this sky rocket! thanks for the usual great articles.