2021 was a year that showed resiliency. Our COO , Ashish Panjabi, sums up the successes and changes of 2021 and what our customers can expect from us in 2022.
After the uncertainties of 2020, Mr. Panjabi noticed that the appetite to innovation still continued to burn and budgets weren’t slashed quite as much as we expected. He added, “We found a way of doing business safely and discovered new opportunities emerge across various sectors.”
2021 was a year in which Jacky’s managed to broaden its portfolio in the robotics space. New robots for the F&B industry were added to the portfolio that can bring food directly to the table from the kitchen. With the opening of the F&B sector, the was still a need to reduce human contact where possible, and so these robots from Pudu Robotics were well received.
At a time when cleaning and hygiene has taken on more importance, we introduced the Whiz commercial robot from Softbank Robotics. We conducted several proof of concept installations late in 2021 for hotels, shopping malls and larger venues who were able to see the benefits of having an autonomous vacuuming robot. This came at a time when recruiting cleaning staff has also been riddled with challenges and helped the human cleaning staff to focus on areas like spot cleaning whilst at the same time ensuring that floors were cleaned regularly by robots.
Our traditional queue management systems also saw a resurgence in demand as more customer service centres opened up again. The need to manage crowds responsibly meant customers for queuing system were able to take advantage of real time reporting and analysis across their network of branches. This helped them with managing resources across different locations at different times of the day.
For the UAE, 2022 will be about capturing opportunities that the liberalization of several government policies that the country has brought about and those that were created as a result of Expo 2020.
We expect 2022 to be a boom year regionally. Qatar is of course hosting the FIFA World Cup and related to that, we are seeing a lot of opportunities for our robotic solutions as well as our speciality cutting solutions from Zund.
We expect more manufacturing activity to happen within the region, which is where products like the Zund cutters we deal in may see more opportunity. The pipeline we carry forward from 2021 to 2022 has changed in that it is not just those in the graphics industry but various manufacturing sectors that are now making enquiries about suitable cutting machines.
Saudi Arabia has also seen a resurgence and there are various projects that should see our various robotic solutions, especially those from Softbank Robotics like Pepper; because we have development partners based in Saudi Arabia who can develop customized solutions on the Pepper platform.
We also hope supply chains settle down and we can start to match demand with supply. Many of our manufacturers have been working on strategies to diversify their manufacturing base or build additional manufacturing capacity. Air freight and sea freight could remain a bottleneck for some time but hopefully settles down as the year progresses.
In 2022, we will continue to explore opportunities in new vertical sectors with more partners that have sector experience. If you are in banking, retail, hospitality or the events industry, we’d be interested to chat and look at how we can leverage opportunities that exist within your industries.
If you want to find out more about how any of our can help your business, please reach out to our teams for more information or a consultation.
