BEIRUT: Pizza Hut could re-open in Lebanon within six months after the chain was forced to close its outlets in the country, said its country boss.
General Manager Riad Sabbagh revealed that a Lebanese expatriate investor based in Africa may help to revive the business, in an exclusive interview with Arab News.
“We faced an issue in importing our raw materials and transferring our money abroad and we tried to resist the pandemic impact as much as possible,” he said in a telephone interview from Beirut. “There will be a return to Lebanon within five to six months. Pizza Hut agency owners found another investor, a Lebanese investor who works in the restaurant field in Africa, who can take the lead in Lebanon.”
He declined to identify the potential investor as the matter is still confidential.
Pizza Hut said on Sunday it was closing in Lebanon as the fast food chain succumbed to the country’s deepening economic crisis.
The family food favorite posted a notice on social media thanking its customers for their support and asking them to “hold on to these memories until we make new ones.”
Rocketing inflation, power blackouts and the closure of a number of institutions have all contributed to the collapse of the country’s economy and a mass exodus of Lebanese seeking work abroad.
For foreign food and beverage franchises that rely on imported goods priced in dollars, the collapse of the Lebanese pound has been especially difficult to absorb.
In a notice posted on its Facebook page, Pizza Hut Lebanon said: “We will never forget the excitement on your face whenever you get your cheese stuffed crust pizza . . . Offering you the best quality and experience has always been our top priority. Until we are able to do that, with a heavy heart, we say goodbye!”
The country’s economic situation has deteriorated rapidly over the last year, especially since a massive explosion at Beirut Port last August when improperly stored materials detonated and destroyed residential areas nearby — killing 211 people and leaving thousands homeless.
The blast led to the closure of dozens of businesses in the capital and made a bad situation even worse for the city’s residents.
The closure of Pizza Hut represents the latest business casualty of the ongoing crisis.
Customers mourned the loss of the restaurant chain on social media with some bitter sweet comments.
“We hope to follow you soon,” said Hayssam Hnayneh on the company’s Facebook page.
“My memory is that pizza we ordered on the 4th of August and arrived a few minutes right before the Beirut explosion and we couldn’t eat it because it got full of shattered glass,” said Charbel Khoury
Lebanon Pizza Hut boss expects return of chain
https://arab.news/833bn
Lebanon Pizza Hut boss expects return of chain
- The family food favorite posted a notice on social media thanking its customers for their support
As world fractures, experts weigh in on the politics of AI at WGS
- e& group CEO Hatem Dowidar said there was increasing pressure to choose between the Chinese and US ecosystems
DUBAI: Across three days of rigorous debate at the World Government Summit in Dubai, experts from some of the world’s largest tech and telecommunication companies debated what the future political landscape of artificial intelligence development would be.
Speaking at the summit on Thursday, e& group CEO Hatem Dowidar said there was increasing pressure to choose between the Chinese and US ecosystems, which could have impacts on the sovereign capabilities of countries, like Gulf Cooperation Council member states, which thus far have stayed in the middle.
“I think the fracture and the pressure today is if you use this technology, you cannot use the other. You must separate them completely and this is something that never happened before,” Dowidar said.
He warned that whilst people around the world currently have access to both the leading large language models in the US and China, ChatGPT and Deepseek, this would not always be the case, and middle powers would need to develop their own capability to maintain their sovereignty.
“Europe is trying to find its own way as well, because Europe — having been caught now in the middle — they don’t have platforms, they don’t have the data center capability,” he said.
“So now, Europe is focusing a lot on building sovereign capability, sovereign data centers to run AI applications within Europe.”
Dowidar said the GCC had been ahead of the curve in this regard, having worked out early on that sovereign capability would be necessary in the new multipolar world and subsequently investing heavily in local infrastructure and capability.
“We were lucky here in the region that already — I would say a couple of years ago —we have kind of ironed out how this works,” he said.
“I think that everyone will try to see how they can either utilize the global platforms in a sovereign manner, or they end up trying to push to develop their own platforms.”
This sentiment was echoed by Chamath Palihapitiya, the founder and managing partner of Social Capital, who said that China’s dedication to open-source models — whose code is released under a license granting users rights to view, study, modify, and redistribute it freely — could make Chinese AI more popular in the long run for nations looking to keep some level of sovereignty.
“I do think that there are a handful of American open-source models that are quite good. I think Nvidia’s models are excellent. But in fairness, the Chinese open-source models are just superb,” he told the summit on Wednesday.
“It’s going to be important for every country to make their own decisions about their own sovereignty, and in that realm, I think the open-source models provide the clearest path, because it just gives you total transparency to what’s happening underneath the hood.”
This was reiterated by Joseph Tsai, the chairman and co-founder of Alibaba Group, who said Chinese open-source systems would be favored by middle powers — but warned they had yet to find a way to be economically self-sufficient.
“Because countries care about the sovereignty aspect and care about their data privacy, you can take an open-source model and deploy it on your own infrastructure … giving you ownership and control” he said.
“But it remains to be seen how economically all the model companies are going to make it sort of sustainable with an open-source approach … This is the biggest challenge for the Chinese firms.”
