Page 150 - Aamir Rehman - Dubai & Co Global Strategies for Doing Business in the Gulf States-McGraw-Hill (2007)

134 Dubai & Co.

Today, however, the game has changed. The Gulf is much
more attractive than ever before The investor community, guided
largely by savvy research analysts and global strategists, is always
on the lookout for opportunities that promise fast growth in pros-
perous emerging markets—seen as a sign of a firm’s long-term
expansion prospects. Emerging market revenues often capture, in
fact, a premium over mature market revenues when analysts value
global firms. China and India, therefore, have established roles for
themselves near the top of most multinationals’ agendas. And now
the time seems right to turn to the GCC and to capture the abundant
opportunity.
Figure 5.1 shows the three different levels of engagement at
which international firms typically enter a new market. Each of
these levels contains its own set of market-entry strategies to be
employed once the level of engagement is decided on. Taken
together, these three levels of market engagement can be called the
“Engagement Spectrum.”

Figure 5.1 The Engagement Spectrum of market-entry strategies

“Shallow engagement” strategies are typically for the most
minimal form of engagement, involving simple distribution
agreements by which a local firm sells goods that are manufactured,
branded, and provided by the multinational. The local firm is
typically granted exclusivity—the sole right to distribute goods
within a particular market on behalf of the multinational. In return,