What Crosses the Border and What Does Not

The Year I Ignored the Sequence

In 2010 I entered every market at once. UAE, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Kuwait, Oman. I did not have a product to sell yet, which in hindsight is the more interesting half of that sentence.

Everyone who writes about this region will tell you that was the wrong thing to do, and by the logic they use, it was. Here is what actually happened.

The first installed references came from the UAE, as the advice predicts. But the traction that followed did not arrive in the order anybody would have drawn. Qatar, Oman and Kuwait delivered ahead of Saudi Arabia — not marginally, and not late. Saudi Arabia, the market with the largest budget and the most obvious reason to be first, was the last one to move.

My read on why the small markets paid early is that nobody had bothered with them. Every vendor entering the region was pointed at the same two countries, and the others were being served at arm's length by people who visited occasionally. Arriving properly in a market where the competition is arriving occasionally is a real advantage, and it is available in exactly the places the standard advice tells you to skip.

Saudi Arabia started moving later, and I can tell you precisely what changed. It was not that I had finally accumulated enough credibility elsewhere. It was that I put a person in the market.

That distinction matters because the two produce different plans. If you believe the sequence, you build a country plan. If you believe what the sequence stands for, you build a capability plan, and then you let demand tell you which door opens first.

What the First Market Is Actually For

The soft version of this argument says the UAE is where you build credibility. True, and too vague to act on.

Here is the harder version. The first market is where you manufacture the specific physical things a buyer in the second market will demand you already have — and almost none of them are documents.

A demonstration capability, in a place a prospect can reach. Reference sites a prospect can travel to, walk around, and where they can talk to the end user without you in the room. An installation and service team with a base in the region, close enough to be on site the same day or the next one. And people who have been in the region long enough to work in it.

That last one is easy to underrate. Getting technical staff into Saudi Arabia was a process in those days. It is considerably easier now, but the underlying point has not changed: a team already acclimatised to the region is a different asset from a team that has to be flown in, and the difference shows up in response times that a buyer is measuring whether or not they tell you.

None of this is credibility in the abstract. It is a room, some sites, some bodies and a logistics chain. And the reason it matters is that once it exists in the region, it travels within the region.

What Actually Does Not Travel

This is where the received wisdom is least reliable, and it is worth being specific about which parts.

The entity, in my case, was never the obstacle. We never held an entity for transactions. We worked through local partners in Saudi Arabia with a team in the UAE behind them, and that structure carried the confidence a buyer needed without a registered presence in our own name. That is not universal — some large public projects require an in-country entity and will not proceed without one — but the assumption that you must incorporate before you can sell is wrong often enough to be worth testing rather than accepting.

The distributor did travel, through a structure. Our distributor imported into the UAE and re-exported into Saudi Arabia, with local documentation issued on their own letterhead, drafted in line with what the receiving side expected. That is a real capability and it is not something a distributor either has or does not have by accident — it is built from having done it before and knowing what the paperwork has to look like.

What did not travel was the paperwork from head office. Standard shipping documents produced in the United States always went back for changes before goods could move smoothly. Every time. That is the item nobody warns you about, because it does not appear in any market-entry framework and it does not sound like a strategic problem. It is an administrative one that stops physical goods at a border, which makes it a strategic problem with an administrative costume on.

So the list of things that do not cross the border is shorter than the one most vendors carry, and different from it. It is not your corporate structure. It is your documentation, drafted by people who have never seen a Gulf customs process — and paperwork of that kind is either built once, properly, before anyone is waiting for it, or it is rebuilt badly under deadline on every shipment.

Saudi Arabia: Presence, Not Position

The reason Saudi Arabia is a second market is usually explained in terms of difficulty. Procurement is heavier, approvals take longer, relationships matter more. All true, and all slightly beside the point.

What made it move for me was a person in the market. Not a visit pattern, not a distributor with an office there, not a stronger reference list. Somebody based there, whose job was that country.

It is the same finding that makes covering this region with quarterly visits so unproductive — being present and being seen occasionally are different things, and buyers here can tell them apart — and it is the reason the first person you put in the region is such an expensive thing to get wrong. Saudi Arabia is the market where presence and absence produce the most visibly different results, which is why it looks like the hardest country and is really the least forgiving one.

The practical consequence is that the question is not when do we enter Saudi Arabia. It is what has to be true before a person there can succeed — because putting somebody into a market without the demo, the references, the service capability and the documentation behind them is not entering the market. It is stationing a witness to your own absence.

Finding the first buyer in Saudi Arabia generally takes longer than finding the first buyer in the UAE. That is a real pattern and it is the strongest argument for the standard sequence. But it is an argument about where your first success is cheapest to obtain, not about where your business will eventually be largest.

The Markets You Do Not Plan For

Qatar, Oman and Kuwait are consistently described as later-phase markets, and I have described them that way myself. My own experience does not entirely support it.

They are smaller, and that part is true. Qatar's opportunities are government-led and arrive episodically rather than as a pipeline, which makes it a difficult market to build a forecast around. Kuwait moves at the speed of the relationship, and impatience is the single most reliable way to lose time there.

But small and neglected are different properties, and the second one is worth something. A market where three vendors are competing seriously is a harder place to win than a market where twelve are competing occasionally. If a category has been served from a distance for years, arriving properly is a differentiator by itself, and that condition is far more common in the smaller Gulf states than in the two everybody targets.

So these are not planned markets. They are opportunistic ones, and the distinction is not a softer version of the same thing — it changes what you build. You do not build a country plan for an opportunistic market. You build the ability to hear it when it happens.

How You Hear the Opportunity

An opportunistic market is worthless if nothing tells you an opportunity exists in it. Most vendors have no sensing mechanism at all, which is why the advice to "stay open" to these markets tends to produce nothing.

There are four places the signal actually comes from, and none of them require a presence in the country.

The partner network hears first. A distributor or integrator working across the Gulf sees demand in markets you are not covering, because they are quoting in them. That intelligence exists whether or not you ask for it, and most vendors never ask. A standing question to every regional partner about what they are seeing outside your target countries costs nothing and is the highest-yield sensing you can run.

The consultants and specifiers work across borders. Specifications in this region take shape years before a tender, and the same consulting firms write them in more than one country. If your product has been specified once, the people who specified it are working on other projects elsewhere. Knowing which is a conversation, not a research project.

Sectors move together. Banks, energy companies and government programmes in these markets watch each other closely and share ownership, boards and advisors more often than an outsider expects. A project delivered for one institution is visible to its counterparts across the region, and that visibility runs across borders more freely than most vendors assume.

And inbound enquiry means something different here. In a saturated market an unsolicited enquiry is noise — it was generated by someone's marketing, possibly yours, and it tells you little. In an under-served market nothing generated it. Nobody was campaigning there. An enquiry from a market you are not working is therefore a far stronger signal than the same enquiry from a market you are, and it is routinely treated as the weaker one because it is smaller.

The practical rule is that these markets should be a filter, not a plan. Decide in advance what would make an opportunity real enough to act on — a named end user, a funded project, a partner willing to carry it — and then act quickly when one clears the bar, rather than debating whether the country deserves a strategy.

Where None of This Applies

The whole argument above is about physical goods. It rests on shipping, customs, spares, service response and demonstration hardware, and if none of those apply to you then most of it does not either.

Software and services do not follow this pattern. They can go wherever the demand is created, because the constraint that makes hardware sequential — the movement of physical items across a border — is simply not present. A software business with a live opportunity in Saudi Arabia and nothing in the UAE should pursue the opportunity, not the sequence.

Components sold into somebody else's system integration are the second exception. Where your product sits inside a bill of materials rather than appearing as a line item the customer selects, the market-entry rules that govern a named brand largely do not reach you. The integrator carries the market-facing burden. Your problem is the integrator, not the country.

And registration-led categories run their own clock. Medical devices requiring registration are governed by the approval cycle, which is longer in Saudi Arabia than in the UAE. The sequence for those categories is not a commercial choice — it is set by whichever regulator moves first.

This is commercial guidance and not legal or tax advice, current as at September 2026. Requirements and market conditions in this region change, and they change without much notice — verify anything here against your own category before you commit to a plan.

What I Got Wrong

I entered five markets at once, in 2010, before I had a product to sell.

The defence I would have offered at the time is that early presence builds relationships, and that is not entirely wrong — the traction that came out of Qatar, Oman and Kuwait was real, and it is unlikely I would have found it if I had been pointed exclusively at the two obvious countries. But the reason it worked is not the reason I would have given. It worked because those markets were under-served, not because spreading myself thinly was a strategy.

What I actually got wrong was the order of operations inside each market rather than the order of the markets themselves. I was building relationships in five countries while the capability that would let me convert them — the demo, the references, the service base, the documentation — existed in none of them yet. The relationships were real and most of them waited. Some did not, and those were expensive.

Saudi Arabia is the clearest evidence. It did not open because I had waited long enough or built enough credibility elsewhere. It opened when somebody was there. I could have reached that conclusion several years earlier than I did, and the cost of not reaching it was not a lost deal but a lost period — a stretch of time in which the largest market in the region was being covered rather than worked.

The lesson I would give anyone planning entry: the sequence is a reasonable default and it is not a plan. The plan is the capability, and the country order is downstream of it.

Everything above concerns the Gulf. The sequencing question is a Gulf question, because these are the markets close enough together that what you build in one can physically serve another. The wider region comes after this base is settled, and it is a separate decision rather than the next step in this one — the capability that carries you across the Gulf does not carry you into it.

Connektions MEA works with vendors deciding which market comes first and what has to exist before it can. That work is described under Market Scan.