Middle East
Aerospace technology
Saudi Arabia
We work with manufacturers and brand owners on where to grow next, who should carry the product once you are there, and how the relationship should be structured. Scoped and priced before anything begins.
In the markets we are asked about, there is no reliable list of who distributes what. What exists is fragmented, years out of date, or behind a language barrier, and the claims that do exist — coverage, licences, warehouse capacity — are routinely overstated in a first meeting.
So the work is primary. Registries, licensing bodies, customs and tender records, trade press and local-language sources, and then conversations with people who actually trade in the category. It is slower than desk research and it is the only thing that produces an answer you can defend to a board.
Engagements are scoped and priced against a written brief before they start. You see the criteria we will screen on and the shape of the output before any fieldwork begins, and the consultants who scope the work are the ones who run it.
They are scoped and priced separately so you take only what you need, and they are designed to run together when a market entry needs all of it.
Which markets are worth the effort, in what order, and why. Demand sized from the bottom up, tested against the access conditions that actually apply and against what you can realistically serve.
About this serviceHow a market really functions: who holds the shelf, the workshop or the tender, on what terms and through whom. Structure, customers, competitors, pricing and the regulatory position, built from primary sources.
About this serviceFrom a market with no reliable list to a signed agreement with the right company in it. We map the landscape, screen against your requirements and deliver a ranked shortlist with the reasoning shown.
About this serviceJoint ventures, local partners and acquisitions, for the markets where a distributor is not the right structure in the first place — because of ownership rules, tender qualification or the scale of the commitment.
About this serviceMost engagements finish somewhere further along — in a meeting room, a regulatory submission or a signed agreement. These are scoped as add-ons to any of the four.
A shortlist is not a partner. We make the approach, sit in the discussions, and advise on terms — exclusivity scope, territory definition, minimum volumes, termination — where local practice differs from what you expect.
Meetings arranged, briefed and sequenced before you fly, so a week in market produces decisions rather than introductions. We prepare the brief on each party and attend where useful.
Whether your product can be registered, what it requires, who must hold the registration and how long it takes. Run before you commit to a market rather than after — it frequently changes the answer.
Channel structure, pricing position, coverage model and phasing. How the market actually buys your category, and what that means for how you should sell into it.
Who already holds the shelf, the workshop or the tender, and who the end customers are, how they buy and what they currently pay. Often the fastest route to understanding why a market has not opened for you yet.
A conversation, then a written brief: the market, the product, the criteria a partner has to meet and the deal-breakers. You see the screening criteria and the shape of the output before any fieldwork starts, with a fixed scope and a fixed price.
Registries, licensing bodies, customs and tender records, trade press and local-language sources — then conversations with people who actually trade in the category. Where a market is live on Hub, that groundwork is already done and the project starts further along.
Every candidate assessed against your criteria on the same fifty-plus fields, with conflicts flagged and the reasoning shown. You get a ranked shortlist with an honest note on where each candidate is weaker, not a list of names.
Approach, meetings, diligence questions and negotiation support for as far as you want us to go. Some clients take the shortlist and run it themselves; most ask us to stay in the room.
DistributorIQ Hub came out of this practice. It holds the distributor picture for the markets we have already built, kept current, so that groundwork does not have to be repeated on every project. Where your market is live on Hub, an engagement starts further along and costs less. Where it is not, we build it from scratch — which is most of what we do.
A sample of the engagements this team has run. They are listed to show the range of sectors and geographies the practice has worked across — filter by either. Client names and findings are confidential and are not shared.
The country, the sector and what you are trying to do is enough to start. We come back with a scope, a timeline and a price before any work begins.