SAS Holding, a Saudi holding company that owns Azian Telecommunications, Trade, NTC, among other companies in the telecommunications industry, purchased Glowork, the first dedicated organization for women employment throughout the Middle East. SASCORP's current activities include working with the local operators on distributing and facilitating their fiber optics capabilities to their clients. They currently have over 1000 employees and with the new acquisition, it is expected that Glowork's operations grow from a current 10 employees to a 150 employees in the next two years. Glowork's current online work includes its online portal www.glowork.net which is a platform that links female jobseekers and employers, it also has a system that allows women to work virtually from home which has helped create opportunities for them in rural areas and this led to Glowork signing a private public partnership with the Ministry of Labor. From an offline perspective, Glowork also has a headhunting arm which conducts the filtering, screening, interviewing and mentoring for Saudi females, as well as them operating the first public female career fair which attracted over 17000 female job seekers and over 500 women were hired. “Today is a day that showcases Saudi start-ups will lead the way for the future generations “ said Khalid Alkhudair the Founder and CEO of Glowork. “We are thankful for everyone who has supported us during the past two years, from employees, the government and the private sector. This investment will allow us to achieve our full potential and the future is bright for Saudi women”. Alkhudair also confirmed that the social enterprise will continue to operate under the same mission and vision it set out to do “The new investors have promised us that our current operations wont change and we will still be socially driven. The reason I started this business 2 years ago, is to build an understanding for the Middle East that social entrepreneurship is important and today we witness a success story” Saeed Abdullah Al Sarari, the Chairman of SAS Holding, said: “We have a full belief in Glowork and expanding its current activities to the next level. We plan to build on Glowork's current strong presence in the Middle East and turn it into a global entity by Gods will.” The estimated amount that will be invested into Glowork is around SR60 million ($16 million) over the course of the next couple of years, which gives the new owner the majority share of 51 percent and the remaining equity is broken down to its current founders Khalid Alkhudair, Jamal Almansour and Khalid Alsaleh. — SG
