Saudi Arabia · Market Entry · Strategy
I first landed in Riyadh in the summer of 2009, on a corporate strategy internship at flynas during my MBA at INSEAD. There was no Vision 2030. There was a country quietly getting on with the work of becoming something larger.
I am asked, with increasing frequency, what foreign companies get wrong when they enter Saudi Arabia. Most of my answer comes down to three patterns. None of them are about strategy. All of them are about pace.
The first is that they confuse access with traction. The second is that they import their hiring instincts wholesale. The third is that they sign the lease too early. Each one is expensive. Together they are often fatal to the market entry.
Saudi Arabia is, at this moment, an extraordinarily generous market. Doors open quickly. Senior people will take a meeting. Coffees turn into introductions. Introductions turn into more coffees. Within thirty days, a foreign operator with a half-decent thesis will have met more interesting people in Riyadh than they would have met in eighteen months in London or New York.
That generosity is real. It is also routinely misread.
Foreign teams come back to head office reporting momentum. The pipeline looks full. The deck gets updated. The board feels confident. Then six months pass and almost nothing has actually closed, because conversations were being measured as progress when in this market they are upstream of progress.
In Saudi Arabia, access is generous. Progress is earned. The two are easy to confuse and expensive to confuse for long.
I once moved to hire a candidate on the basis of the credentials I knew how to read. A Saudi colleague told me directly that the profile would not work in our operating model. He was right. I learned the same lesson several more times before I stopped needing to.
Credentials are not comparable across geographies. The profiles that signal high performance in your home market may signal something quite different here. Until you have rebuilt your calibration locally, which takes months not weeks, you should be hiring slowly, on shorter engagements, with more patience than your head office is comfortable with.
The instinct in a new market is to look decisive. Sign the lease. Lock in the office. Send the photo back to head office. Show momentum. It is the wrong instinct.
In the first six months in Saudi Arabia, almost every conviction you hold will be revised at least once. Operators you thought would carry you turn out to be peripheral. The neighbourhood you assumed your team would live in turns out to be the wrong one. The hire who looked like a star turns out to be miscalibrated for what you are actually trying to build.
The companies that succeed here protect their optionality through this period. They sign nothing they cannot exit within ninety days. They hire on contract before they hire on permanent. They pilot before they scale. They stay reversible until they have earned conviction, and only then commit.
There is one observation I have come back to repeatedly over fifteen years in this market. It is the one that takes the longest for foreign operators to internalise.
Saudi Arabia rewards duration in a way few other markets do.
In most markets, the relationship between time invested and returns generated is roughly linear. You put in two years, you get two years of network, credibility, and traction. This market does not behave that way. The first two years often feel slower than they should. You build, you show up, you keep your word, you stay through the phases when the easy thing would be to leave. And then somewhere in the third or fourth year, sometimes later, the curve bends. Doors that took eighteen months to open the first time open in eighteen minutes. The same names start appearing in different rooms. People you helped quietly when there was nothing in it for you remember, in ways that matter.
The people and companies that build something durable in Saudi Arabia share one characteristic that cuts across sector, nationality, and size. They decided, at some point, that they were here for the long game and then they behaved accordingly. Every decision they made assumed they would still be here in five years. They hired for it. They structured deals for it. They chose partners for it.
That posture, compounded over time, is worth more in this market than any single strategic insight. It is the variable that the pitch decks do not contain.
The next five years will bring more foreign operators into this market than the previous twenty combined. Expo 2030. The 2034 World Cup. The continued execution of Vision 2030. The capital is committed. The question is no longer whether the international operators come. The question is which of them succeed.
The answer, based on fifteen years of watching this market absorb and expel foreign operators, is the ones who arrived understanding that access is the beginning of the work, not the work itself. And who stayed long enough to find out what the work actually was.
I help foreign companies get their first eighteen months in Saudi Arabia right, and the senior families coming with them actually land. If you are thinking about that entry, read this on what the first 90 days should look like for the individuals making the move.