United Arab Emirates, 4 November 2022: Emirates Global Aluminium, the largest industrial company in the United Arab Emirates outside oil and gas, has won a platinum UAE Innovation Award from Dubai Quality Group.

The UAE Innovation Awards are held under the patronage of His Highness Sheikh Ahmed bin Saeed Al Maktoum, President of Dubai Civil Aviation Authority, Chairman of Dubai Airports, Chairman and Chief Executive of Emirates Airline and Group.

EGA received the platinum UAE Innovation Award for the company’s success in creating global competitive advantage through innovation and continuous improvement.

Abdulnasser Bin Kalban, Chief Executive Officer of EGA said: “We are honoured to be recognised at the UAE Innovation Awards. Innovation and continuous improvement have been at the core of EGA for decades and are part of our values. We now have a bold aspiration to innovate the future of aluminium production and act as a technology pathfinder for our global industry.” 

EGA has developed its own aluminium smelting technology in the UAE for more than 30 years. The company has used its own technology in every smelter expansion since the 1990s and has retrofitted all its older production lines. In 2016, EGA became the first UAE industrial company to license its core process technology internationally, in a deal with Aluminium Bahrain.

In continuous improvement, EGA operates one of the longest-running structure suggestion schemes in the world. Over the past few decades, some 500,000 suggestions for operational and technical improvements have been made by EGA employees, generate hundreds of millions of dirhams in cost savings. Savings from these suggestions are shared with the employees who make them.

EGA also runs a programme called ‘Tamayaz’, through which mid-level managers at EGA bring together their teams to understand problems, conduct detailed analyses to find potential improvements, and implement them.

The UAE Innovation Awards were launched in 2016 by Dubai Quality Group and support the National Innovation Strategy and the organisation’s mandate to promote quality and excellence in the UAE.