Smaël Auam

Smaël Auam is the Group Chief People Officer at DP World. He leads the Group’s global people strategy, driving organisational performance, leadership development and cultural evolution to enable sustainable, long-term growth across DP World’s global operations. In this role, he is responsible for shaping a future-ready organisation — strengthening leadership capability, advancing employee engagement and embedding talent frameworks that support the company’s expanding and increasingly integrated global portfolio.

Smaël brings more than 20 years of international experience in human resources strategy, executive compensation and organisational transformation. In his previous role at DP World, he served as Group Executive Vice President, Total Rewards, where he led the design and implementation of global total rewards and mobility frameworks across the company’s international footprint, playing a central role in shaping DP World’s people agenda for over 12 years.

During his tenure, Smaël designed and implemented DP World’s global job architecture and banding framework, modernised executive remuneration programmes, led global salary and bonus cycles, and developed incentive structures aligned with DP World’s long-term strategy and growth ambitions. His work has supported workforce transformation, strengthened governance and enhanced alignment between performance, reward and enterprise value creation.

He also played a pivotal HR leadership role in DP World’s two largest acquisitions, leading the alignment of total rewards frameworks and organisational design to support the integration of expanded workforces. His leadership ensured consistency in structure, governance and performance alignment during these transformative milestones.

Smaël holds a Master of Science in Management (Finance) from Solvay Business School, Université Libre de Bruxelles.