Well, it's been a busy few months and we've had dozens of new suppliers signup and start promoting their business to our global visitors. Traffic from Saudi Arabia again tops the list with a record 74,766 visits in February followed by the United States with 55,389 visits. Take a look at our visitor map below. It shows most of our visitors from those two countries with many others also visible.

Unique daily visitors are also climbing up with a total of 6,427 in February and a minimum of 323 per day.  See the figures from Cloudflare below.

Neom has entered the frame to become the next location to host Formula E races in Saudi Arabia, with talks having taken place between city and championship officials.  The planned smart city of Neom, situated by the Red Sea, is known to be very interested in hosting future Formula E races in its bid to become a “centre for sporting excellence”.   This comes as part of the Saudi Vision 2030 programme, which has been devised to reduce the state’s reliance on oil for economic growth following the 2014-15 price collapse.?

After three editions of the Diriyah E-Prix to date, Formula E has eight years remaining on its 10-year deal with the Saudi General Sports Authority to host races in the country, but no one location has exclusivity.   Neom has already hosted a leg of the 2021 Dakar Rally and Extreme E could move there also following a maiden Desert X-Prix event in the Alula region across 3-4 April this year.

In January of this year (2021), NEOM (a portmanteau of the Greek word for ‘new’ and the Arabic word for ‘future’), announced its plans for The Line; a linear, car-free city built from scratch, housing one million citizens and running 170km in length. It’s all very Jetsons, all very inspiring, and all-too easy to see the attraction of packing your bags and moving to what promises to be a utopia in the desert.

“NEOM is all about things that are necessarily future-oriented and visionary,” its Chief Executive Nadhmi al Nasr said. Taleedah, to that end, was a pioneer; the first Saudi model to walk at the Paris Haute Couture shows in July 2018, and the epitome of a modern Saudi woman – well-travelled, well-educated, ambitious, and showing the world exactly how its done.

Saudi Arabia's future Neom city will require a "multiple" of the 4 GW of renewable energy planned in the $5 billion joint venture with Air Products as hydrogen will provide the basis for clean feedstock used in the production of fertilizers, chemicals and oil derivatives, according to Peter Terium, the former CEO of Germany's RWE who is now Neom's head of energy.

Export potential for the 1.2 million mt of ammonia to be produced from hydrogen in the Air Products-ACWA Power-Neom joint venture runs from Japan to Korea, Florida and California, along with parts of Europe, Terium told S&P Global Platts. Saudi Arabia's industrial giants from Aramco to SABIC and Maaden could get involved in using hydrogen from Neom to produce clean fuels, fertilizers and petrochemicals, he said.

Abdullah bin Amer Alswaha, Minister of Communications and Information Technology in Saudi Arabia discusses Neom and Vision 2030. He speaks with Manus Cranny on "Bloomberg Daybreak: Middle East."