Doing business in Saudi Arabia

Saudi Arabia is one of the major players in the Middle East; the main reason of course is that they are the world's largest oil producer. This has made the country very wealthy and it has made it a place where a lot of companies would like to do business. In large part Saudi Arabia is dependent on foreign companies so there is plenty of opportunity for doing business in Saudi Arabia.

The obvious reason that you want to do business in Saudi Arabia is that it is the world's largest oil producer. This has made the country very wealthy. Although this is the main attraction of the country it is far from the only one. Saudi Arabia is making a serious effort to diversify its economy and that means that there is a great deal of opportunity in areas besides oil. The main areas that they are trying to move into include telecommunications, petrochemicals and financial services. In order to do this they are relying heavily on foreign companies.

Since they depend so much on foreign companies to keep their economy growing Saudi Arabia have made a real effort to become an attractive place to do business. The country is consistently ranked as one of the easiest places in the world to do business. There are few rules on foreign ownership or on importing or exporting currency. The country also has very low taxes. Surprisingly for a country that has such a strong economy inflation has been very low for decades, which helps to keep the cost of doing business down. The currency is also very stable.

There are some challenges that you are going to face when it comes to doing business in Saudi Arabia. The biggest is going to be labor, especially skilled labor. Oddly the country has a very high unemployment rate and yet finds it necessary to bring in millions of foreign workers every year. This is not just for skilled jobs a lot of the unskilled jobs are also filled by foreigners. Attracting employees to Saudi Arabia can be a challenge, there aren't many westerners who want to live in the country and by and large the only way to attract them is to offer very high pay rates.

The other issue that you are going to face when doing business in Saudi Arabia is the cultural differences. Culture is very different in Saudi Arabia than it is in the west and this extends to the business world as much as anything. For the most part things move at a slower pace, this frustrates a lot of western business people but it is something that you will need to adjust to. The same is true of the need to stop work for prayer several times a day. Saudi business men tend to put more emphasis on personal relationships when doing business so that is something you will need to keep in mind as well.