Deloitte Middle East drives diversity amid global record revenues

The Middle East branch of Deloitte has followed up on the firm’s record-breaking revenue haul for 2019 with a local viewpoint.

Having last month announced a near double-digit rise in collective global revenues of $46.2 billion – up by $3 billion on last year’s take to firmly establish the firm as the biggest of the Big Four – the regional wing of professional service giant has now weighed in on the achievement, including its addition of 1,200 new staff-members in the Middle East over the last year alone. Together with Europe and Africa, the firm’s EMEA division grew by 7.9 percent.

“Our FY2019 results are a validation of Deloitte’s strategy to deliver high-quality, globally consistent service to our clients while continuing to serve the public interest,” said Deloitte Middle East Omar Fahoum. “We evolved and innovated our offerings to address current and emerging client needs, and we increased our investments in learning and development to build a workforce with deep knowledge, capabilities, and leading-edge insights.”

From a regional perspective, Fahoum pointed to this month’s launch of Deloitte’s state-of-the-art Digital Centre in Riyadh – which marked Deloitte Digital’s official entry into the Middle East – as a demonstration of the firm’s commitment to the region, representing a key pillar of its local growth plans. Part of that growth has been the injection of fresh talent, adding 1,200 new faces locally among its more than 90,000 recruitments worldwide, taking its overall global headcount to 310,000-plus professionals.

A part of that local recruitment drive has been a focus on improving the firm’s diversity profile. “Our focus is unwavering on diversity and inclusion, and advancement of women to leadership positions in the firm,” said Deloitte Middle East’s Talent and Communications Partner Rana Salhab, who was one of the first females to be admitted to the firm’s regional partnership and was last year named among 200 globally as a leading champion for diversity in business.

Salhab continued; “In the last year, 51 percent of the interns joining the Deloitte Middle East Tadarab program were women, and women formed close to thirty five percent of experienced and graduate hires from across the region. We have strategies and programmes to increase the number of women in our leadership ranks throughout the organisation, with close to 20 percent of our senior management to partner positions being currently held by women.”

Among the firm’s diversity programmes is the Women in Cyber initiative, which was launched locally last year to promote greater gender balance in the cyber-security sector. The firm has also been involved in promoting an increase the ratio of women in finance and technology in collaboration with the Association of Chartered Certified Accountants, and recently admitted Dubai-based forensics director Rana Shasha’a to the its local partnership ranks. 

“In today’s hyperconnected world, the best solutions to address client challenges are developed by ecosystems of problem solvers,” concluded Fahoum, who oversees a team of 3,000-plus across 15 countries in the region. “Deloitte’s success is driven, in part, by our alliance relationships with many of the world’s most powerful and innovative companies that help our clients solve their most complex problems, shape new markets, and create sustainable value.”