JEDDAH: Julian Birchett, the strategic alliance advisor to UK Trade and Industry (North West), leads a 12-member trade mission that landed here on Friday night. The mission, consisting of mainly small and medium businesses, is on a seven-day visit to the Kingdom.
The mission mix is varied with medical laboratory and testing equipment, wind-power electrical generation, a specialist 3D computer graphics company and a building lighting control firm.
“The group consists mainly of people new to the Kingdom and are small to medium companies in the main dipping an experimental toe in the water,” said Birchett. His advice to them was, “Don’t expect to come back with orders first time out.” Saudi Arabia has its own way of approaching business through personal connections, more often at a person-to-person level instead of a corporate one. Birchett’s advice to visiting companies in his delegation was: “There may be a very good opportunity in volume or profit but the question is how much management bandwidth is there for you to develop to it?”
Birchett elaborated saying that bandwidth was the limit of capacity within the company properly to service and develop effectively the Saudi market. Small companies — typically with an MD and some family members might not have the management capacity to develop it effectively because it would take far too much time to do so.
“It’s about patience and multiple visits,” he said, “and that is a resource question. Ask yourself whether you have the resources to do it. There is no point raising the expectations of a potential partner and not being able to follow through.”
There was always the chance of a mismatch. “It’s often a case of matchmaking the two potential partners and making sure they both have what it takes to make a successful outcome,” continued Birchett. Nine times out of ten that was not the case and they actually had weaknesses in their performance. “So before embarking on a serious relationship across international boundaries you have to make sure that you can follow through and make a success of it.”
Some of the delegation members are already well established in the GCC. Image Foundry, which produces photo-realistic imaging of construction projects, for example, has produced many of the widely broadcast images of Emaar Properties developments.
In the services sector, MMC Learning Services, linked with the Metropolitan university of Manchester accredited with Chartered Institute of Marketing to sell e-learning programs to businesses, marketers and HR specialists.
Saudi Arabia’s massive building program was the spur that encouraged Stephen Woodnutt to join the mission. Delmatic make an innovative lighting control system for office and industrial buildings that look for both efficiency and flexible use of lighting. Using a series of control sensors and a simple computer program, an operator is able to alter the lighting within a building to suit occupancy and building use. Woodnutt’s system proved a popular attraction to visitors. “As a floor use changes and walls and partitions are moved about, the system can be adjusted to suit from a laptop without the need for rewiring the building,” he said demonstrating on an existing Gulf client’s floor plan. At its optimum performance built into the building, it can be retrofitted.
The mission moves to Riyadh today for three days before returning to the UK.