Businesses should not take ‘one size fits all’ approach to Mideast

The Arab world has “tremendous potential” but businesses’ strategies should account for big market variations in the region, a prominent consultant has said.
Ramez Shehadi, executive vice president at Booz Allen Hamilton in the Middle East and North Africa, told CNN’s weekly business show “Marketplace Middle East” that there are significant growth opportunities in the region.
“We think today that the (Middle East) as a whole exhibits tremendous potential, lots of opportunities for growth and with success on multiple levels… at the national scale, certainly at different sector levels,” Shehadi told CNN anchor John Defterios. But he cautioned that global businesses need to adopt nuanced strategies to the region as the Middle East is not “in one condition.”
Shehadi, speaking in the financial hub of Dubai, told CNN: “North Africa is different (to) the Levant, which is different (to) the Gulf states. And any coherent strategy for being effective for this part of the world has to be attuned to the factors which prevail in each one of these areas. Culture is different, the laws are different, the infrastructure maturity is different. And so to be successful you can’t have a one-size-fits-all attitude toward success and to navigating the challenges that prevail.”
Business concerns in the Middle East are very much like those in developed or highly developing markets, he added. “They have to do with supply and demand dynamics, they have to do with trade on a global basis and even within the regional context that exists,” he said.
“The key factor that any institution, organization needs to adopt and embrace whole-heartedly is the rationale for a plan. To go into any market — (Middle East) or otherwise — without a plan for how they intend to react, how they intend to behave… is extremely presumptuous.”

Source: Arab News