The goldmine of new markets

Local partners are key to business success in Libya, where the laws and regulations are not clear cut.

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As football fans direct their attention to the south of the African continent, shrewd investors and business people around the globe are, this year, focusing on its north.

One country in particular, for all its previous issues of sanctions and conflict, is now emerging as one of the most competitive markets in the world for construction contract wins.

Libya, with its colossal infrastructure requirements, house-building plans and generous tourism investment programme, is one emerging market that no GCC contractor can afford to ignore.

Only recently the government outlined its proposals to plough US $100 billion into infrastructure and housing in the next four years, with a view to revamping what it now calls ‘the gateway to Africa’.

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Shortly afterwards, a UK Trade and Investment study ranked the North African oil exporter as the fourth most attractive country in the world for companies to do business, between 2012 and 2014.

Evidently this is what years of under-investment will do to a country, Libya having only properly restored its diplomatic ties with the West and opened up its market to international investors in the last five years.

Subject to a number of economic sanctions by the US since as far back as the 1980s, not to mention UN sanctions from 1992 following the bombing of Pan Am flight 103 over Lockerbie in Scotland, the country has been effectively cast-out of the development rat-race and allowed to slip into a period of stasis for more than three decades.

It wasn’t until 2003 that Libya accepted responsibility for the bombing and agreed to compensate the victim’s families, and only in 2004 that Libya mended its friendship with the US after Colonel Gaddafi decided to relinquish Libya’s weapons development programme. By 2005, Libya was finally ready to do business again.

Today, back on the business map, Libya is offering huge opportunities for contractors, developers, consultants and suppliers from all around the world.

Possessing the second highest gas and the third highest oil reserves in the whole of Africa, the country has a huge amount of foreign currency stores and plenty of available funds.

“The country is in a state of transition,” says Tawfiq Abu Soud, executive director of Drake and Scull Water and Power division, which is currently trying break into the Libyan market.

“This creates significant opportunities across most sectors, the priority ones being building and construction, transport and communications, water and environment and power and electricity.”