Dubai`-: Yalla Group Limited (“Yalla” or the “Company”) (NYSE: YALA), the leading voice-centric social networking and entertainment platform in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), today announced that Eng. Saifi Ismail, President of the Group, has been named winner of the Middle East’s Most Creative Business Leaders Award 2021 in the Digital Entertainment category.
Organized by the Future Forum and the Emirati Estesmarat Magazine, which is issued in Abu Dhabi, winners of the award’s fifth edition held under the theme “Crises…. Bridges of the Future” featured 22 business leaders including Eng. Saifi Ismail who has become the MENA’s Leading Personality of the Year in the Digital Entertainment category.
This year’s edition aimed to highlight the need to improve the capabilities of Arab business and government leaders and adopt the most innovative methodologies to address the Covid-19 pandemic, a global crisis that affected all countries in the world.
Winners of the award have been selected following a poll launched in the past few months to vote for a leading figure in each economic sector in the Middle East according to 15 criteria.
The judging panel said that Engineer Saifi Ismail, President of the Yalla Group, has been named MENA’s Personality of the Year in the entertainment sector after evaluating the successive developments in the digitalization sector in the region.
Established in 2016 at Dubai Internet City, Yalla Group was listed about a year ago on the New York Stock Exchange and has realized impressive financial results in the first nine months of 2021 with revenues exceeding AED 750 million. Meanwhile, the number of monthly active users of Yalla’s applications exceeded more than 25.9 million users by the end of the third quarter of 2021 despite the challenges brought by the Covid-19 pandemic.
Speaking on the occasion, Eng. Saifi Ismail extended his thanks and gratitude to the awarding body and lauded the strong results achieved by the group and the successes made over the past period, which would not have been possible had it not been for the great support of the UAE government.
He added that the Arab digital entertainment and social networking market will witness a qualitative leap over the upcoming period, stressing that Yalla will make the most of the opportunities made available to digital entertainment content makers.
Ismail reiterated the group’s commitment to providing added value services to the customers and users of Yalla applications, adding that the group is in the process of launching new applications that would change the reality of Arab social communication, taking advantage of the successive technological developments that the world is witnessing.