Mr. Mohammed AlAbbar the founder and Chairman of Emaar Properties, one of the largest real estate development companies in the world, and Noon.com, a diversified e-commerce platform, seems to be taking the proverb, ‘Don’t put all your eggs in one basket’ pretty seriously.
So far he has a stake in the online luxury retailer Net-a-Porter, another in logistics firm Aramex, and noon.com’s recent acquisition of JadoPado. Furthermore, Emaar Malls at the behest of Mr. AlAbbar has acquired a 51% stake in Namshi.
But does Mr. Alabbar have one too many baskets?
Recent happenings at Noon.com suggest so, with the failure to launch 20 million SKUs by January 2017, and now newly hired CTO and former Founder and CEO of JadoPado Omer Kassim stepping down just days after the departure of Noon’s CEO and numerous staff. One source says “The biggest issue noon has had beside the technical choices, architecture decisions, product roadmap, milestone planning, not adopting Lean Startup approaches, unable to be iterative and focus on small releases. Is the way people have been treated, ranging from aggressive bullying, personal insults, threats, firing on the spot, attempts at taking ex-employees to court, withholding salaries due, forcing ex-employees to sign legal waivers agreeing to never work in the UAE again, are amongst some of the really bad practices that have plagued noon’s progress”.
An ex-employee even went as far as to say that Noon.com “is one of the most toxic places to work in the world”.
We hope that Mr. Alabbar will shift his focus a little more on Noon.com before its launch in order for it to be the biggest e-commerce portal in the middle east, as it was assumed to be.