Situation
Our client a major conglomerate with revenues of over $18bn and 25,000 staff had a number of activities covering oil & gas, engineering, construction and other sectors in Europe, the Middle East and Africa. A middle east country has recently established an Industrial Clusters Program with automotive as one of 5 focus areas. The purpose of the program was to encourage foreign investment and make the country a major player in vehicle development and production. As a result the country will reduce imports, increase exports, boost employment and increase economic diversification.
Approach
In response the automotive industrial cluster opportunity our client has decided to explore the viability of establishing an automotive manufacturing industry in the country to serve both the domestic and export markets in the GCC countries and MENA region. The opportunity is attractive given the large and growing domestic and regional market and the absence of significant car manufacturing to date. However the challenge in entering the mature automotive market was not be underestimated as it is intensely competitive and dominated by some of the largest and most highly developed industrial businesses in the world.
Lansdowne partnered with Magma were we had previously successfully delivered several very similar ‘popular car’ projects in the recent past. Our CEO-level team brought unrivalled depth of automotive expertise covering well over 200 car programmes on 3 continents and an industry-wide reputation for world-class expertise. In addition to deep industry insight and relationships, our team had a track record of ‘Innovation Delivered’ in the sector – creating and delivering successful new approaches where traditional methods fail. We worked closely with and through our clients to combine our respective capabilities into a single, unified team – combining recognised strategy development, automotive industry and local client knowledge.
Overview of our rapid deployment approach:
- To deploy the prior expertise of our CEO-level automotive team to quickly focus on the key issues
- We addressed the key issues in the first 3 month phase at an appropriate level of detail to allow realistic strategic options to be jointly developed with the client
- We worked closely with the client to develop a detailed understanding of local stakeholder needs in order to build a realistic plan that will allow consensus to develop
- We built a compelling fact-based argument to demonstrate that the selected strategic option were practical and achievable if necessary conditions were met