Software Business in the Middle East

Few weeks ago I traveled to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia to meet the potential customers.

Market of Saudi Arabia is much larger than United Arab Emirates – compare population of 27.6 million in Saudi Arabia against 4.5 million in UAE. I got the impression that it would be much easier to make business in KSA and sell our product over there than in UAE. It might be because of the following reasons:

1. We got agent in Saudi Arabia, who has managed to organize the meetings with top people from official healthcare authorities and healthcare organizations, both private and public. This man made the great job, we had full schedule. The first meeting was at 10:00 am and the last finished by 00:00 am or 1:00 am.
2. People over there seem to be more specific and concrete – they asked clear questions on pretty detailed level about how to integrate drug database into their Hospital Information System (HIS), what technologies we use, what databases we support and so on.
3. I was surprised when people reply on e-mails pretty fast – this is something you do not see very often here in UAE as e-mail seems to be not the most favourite way to communicate here.
4. We got questions from people whom we did not meet but who heard about our product from somebody else.

Couple days ago I got a message that one of the largest hospital in Riyadh got the approval for purchase by purchase committee, and now they are waiting for the final approval from their General Manager, who is on vacation.

There is one interesting thing I have noticed about the business culture in Saudi Arabia – they used to have meetings pretty late at night followed by the late dinner. Normally we had our dinner at 1:00 am or 2:00 am. Surprisingly, we were not the only ones in the restaurant, it was almost full at such late time.

As soon as we get the first customer in the Kingdom, it will mean many trips to Saudi Arabia or even stay there for some time, so that’s might be the interesting experience.