That’s a message displayed outside the United Arab Emirates Pavilion at the World Economic Forum this year.
“Hope is the Most Profitable Business”
I’m going to take that message to heart, and I hope all Americans do as well. (There’s that profitable word again!)
The UAE also hoped to remind us that nothing is impossible. (But nothing, as a business model, is obviously not going to be as profitable as hope.)
Honestly, I never thought of hope as being a business — profitable or unprofitable — until the UAE folks suggested it. But they know a lot more about profit — and hope — than I ever will. The United Arab Emirates is among the world’s ten largest oil producers, and has roughly 100 billion barrels of proven oil reserves located mainly around Abu Dhabi.
Adb Dhabi is also the capital of the UAE.
The UAE produces an average of 3.2 million barrels of petroleum and liquids per day. So, their reserves amount to about 91 years of oil production, at the current rate.
They are probably hoping to find more oil. And more natural gas. They currently have the seventh-largest proven reserves of natural gas in the world, at over 215 trillion cubic feet. In February 2022, they announced the discovery of natural gas resources offshore of Abu Dhabi.
Easy to talk about hope, I guess, when you have lots of oil and natural gas.
And lots of vacant, undeveloped property nearby, where suburbs could hopefully sprout up in the future.
More about undeveloped property in a moment.
Before we jump to conclusions, however, we need to understand if a person, from the one of the richest countries in the Arab world, understands the word “hope” the same way a person located in the middle-of-rural-nowhere in America understands the word “hope”. To get an idea about that, I looked in two of the world’s best-selling books — the Holy Quran (for Arabic ideas) and the Holy Bible (for middle-of-nowhere American ideas.)
For the Quran, I chose an English Translation by Abdullah Yusuf Ali, based on a version revised by the Presidency of Islamic Researches, published and printed by the King Fahd Holy Quran Printing Complex. In this English version, the word “hope” appears 39 times, but I’m referencing Chapter 35, Verse 29 in particular…
29. Those who rehearse the Book of Allah, establish regular Prayer, and spend [in Charity] out of what We have provided for them, secretly and openly, hope for a commerce that will never fail.
…because this verse specifically mentions “commerce that will never fail”. Something any business person would naturally hope for.
But in Chapter 33, we find an obvious distinction, when profit enters the picture:
29. Say: “On the Day of Decision, no profit will it be to Unbelievers if they [then] believe! nor will they be granted a respite.”
On the Day of Decision, it won’t matter if you were hoping for a commerce that never fails, if you have lived your life as an Unbeliever. Into the Pit of Fire with you.
By my count, the word “profit” appears 45 times in the Quran, most often in a negative connection to Unbelievers.
In the New International Version of the Bible, the word “hope” appears 159 times, so a more “hopeful” book, perhaps, than the Quran. But the word “profit” appears only 17 times in the Bible — indicating that the Quran is the more profit-oriented book.
The most hopeful Bible verse might be Romans, Chapter 8, verses 24 and 25:
For in this hope we were saved. But hope that is seen is no hope at all. Who hopes for what he already has?
But if we hope for what we do not yet have, we wait for it patiently.
Unfortunately, I couldn’t find, in either book, validation of the claim that hope is the most profitable business. So we might be tempted to just take the UAE folks’ word for it.
Not being one to give into temptation, I continued my research, and found two websites that had lists showing the “Most Profitable Small Businesses.” Nerdwallet.com claimed that “Food Trucks” are most profitable — for someone like myself with limited financial backing. But UpFlip.com claimed that a “Cupcake Business” was the most profitable small business.
Neither website mentioned “Hope” as being in anyway profitable.
In fact, the UpFlip.com article included a list of the 12 industries that are struggling most, right now, to show a profit. The worst of the bunch was “Real Estate (Development)”.
So maybe we can understand why there’s so much vacant property outside of Abu Dhabi.