Keeta in Qatar: Here for the long run

Doha, Qatar: A year can be a long time in technology, but in the business of building something from scratch, Jane Liu considers it only the beginning.

As Keeta marks its first anniversary in Qatar, its General Manager is less interested in celebrating the passing of 12 months than in what those months have taught the company about the country it now calls one of its international markets.

“I always tell the team that we celebrate the first year not simply because it is the first year, but because it is the first year of a very long journey,” Liu said.

Since entering Qatar, Keeta has established what Liu describes as a ‘relevant’ position in the market, building a solid base of customers and restaurant partners. For a company entering an already competitive food-delivery landscape, however, she believes success cannot simply be measured by taking customers from somewhere else.“One of the reasons we chose Qatar was because it is a growing market,” she says. We are not here only to compete for existing market share. We want to contribute to the market’s growth and raise the industry standard.”

It is an approach shaped partly by Liu’s career in strategy and her experience across China and Saudi Arabia. Food delivery, she explains, may appear fundamentally similar everywhere, restaurants, customers and riders connected through technology, but the details are stubbornly local. What Qataris and residents order, which restaurants they love, how merchants operate and what customers expect cannot simply be imported from another market.

That has required Keeta to keep its ears rather firmly to the ground. Teams regularly speak with customers and merchants, feeding what they learn back into the business.

The next opportunity may extend considerably beyond dinner.

Liu sees growing demand in Qatar for quick commerce across groceries, pharmacies and other everyday categories, while looking further ahead to technology already being commercially deployed in China, including drone delivery and autonomous vehicles.

Yet for all the talk of technology, much of Liu’s conversation returns to people.

Riders, she says, remain one of the most important human touchpoints between a delivery platform and its customers. Keeta has introduced safety initiatives, professional motorcycle training and rider recognition programmes, while also focusing on the dignity and wellbeing of workers who are often thousands of kilometres away from their families.

The same thinking extends to restaurants. Liu points to Qatar’s unusually strong community of small and medium-sized F&B businesses, which Keeta has sought to support not only commercially but through its SMB Constellation programme, sharing the stories of founders behind local restaurants.Running a multicultural operation in Qatar has also influenced Liu’s own philosophy of leadership. Rather than concentrating on what separates nationalities, genders or backgrounds, she prefers looking at what brings people together.

“We are here to learn, to grow and to build something new together,” she says.

And that, perhaps, also describes Keeta’s second year.

Liu wants the business to become more locally relevant, deepen its relationships with customers, merchants, partners and regulators, and contribute more meaningfully to Qatar’s economy. The first year established Keeta’s presence. The years ahead, she believes, will determine how deeply it belongs