Columbia Group hits the ground running with Dubai expansionColumbia Group hits the ground running with Dubai expansion
Columbia Group sees the right conditions for rapid growth in the UAE shipping market and has brought its full service offering to support a growing client base from its new Dubai office, Xanthos Kyriacou, Regional Managing Director at Columbia Group tells Seatrade.
October 9, 2024

Columbia Group entered the Middle East market with its Saudi Arabia office in Riyadh in 2020, pitching the move as just the first in a regional expansion. Four years on, the company saw that the time was right for a new base at Jumeirah Lake Towers.
“Over the past couple of years we have been working with Dubai-based clients, and it was important for us to get closer to those clients,” Xanthos Kyriacou, Regional Managing Director at Columbia Group tells Seatrade.
“Secondly, the expansion matches perfectly with our strategy to develop the business in the GCC countries. There are more and more opportunities in the maritime sector here, and the UAE government is pushing hard to support the industry through its investments. I’m not trying to play music into the ears of the authorities here, it’s just the reality.
“We see the UAE as fertile ground, not only for ship management, but for the wider platform of Columbia’s integrated maritime services. We are not just bringing ‘second party’ management as we like to call it, but we are also focusing on procurement, crew training and wellbeing, catering, and on digitalisation, efficiency and AI through our partnership with SmartSea.”
Digital acceleration
Columbia is breaking new ground with SmartSea as the technology company’s first customer, but the maritime digitalisation outfit has a substantial transport pedigree – SmartSea is the new maritime offering from aviation leader SITA, a membership-owned group with a 70-year history, whose IT and communications technology underpins almost every passenger flight in the world.
For Kyriacou, the UAE is an example of a maritime nation and hub embracing new technologies, and Columbia wants to be at the forefront of unlocking the potential of widespread maritime digitalisation.
“As Columbia, our agreement with SmartSea is to provide our expertise so to bring what the aviation industry has over to maritime, whereby ports are connected to agents, and agents are connected to vessels, etc. This is just a first step in what we must do to remain at the forefront and prepare ourselves for the future, because the world is changing rapidly, and we need to change along with it.”
SITA estimates that the maritime industry is around 10-15 years behind aviation in technology, a gap it aims to narrow with SmartSea.
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This article is part of the Seatrade Maritime Middle East Report 2024
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