Leadership & Executive Interviews · 4 Sep 2026
Layla Al Hashimi
Group Chief Operating Officer · Emirates Industrial Holding
“Operational excellence is quiet work. It only becomes visible when you stop doing it.”
Layla Al HashimiGroup Chief Operating Officer
Emirates Industrial Holding
Emirates Industrial Holding
Leading operations across five business units, Layla Al Hashimi discusses industrial diversification, workforce nationalisation and why she believes operational transparency is the region's next competitive advantage.
- Diversification is a national priority. What does it mean operationally?
- It means running businesses with genuinely different rhythms inside one group. A logistics unit and an advanced manufacturing unit do not share a planning cycle. Pretending they do is how groups lose money quietly for years.
- How do you approach workforce development?
- By building career paths rather than filling quotas. If a graduate can see the next three roles clearly, retention takes care of itself. Our best operations managers came through a programme we started eight years ago.
- What would you change about how regional industry communicates?
- We under-report. Companies here achieve genuinely world-class operational results and describe them in two sentences on a corporate website. That is a missed opportunity for the sector as a whole.
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