North Africa draws serious companies for good reasons. The region sits on Europe’s doorstep, with industrial ambition that is no longer aspirational — aerospace and automotive supply chains that have matured over two decades, a fast-moving energy transition, defence and security modernisation, and a genuine appetite for local industrial partnership and offset. The opportunity is real. So is the failure rate among competent European firms who approach it as a purely commercial market.
The recurring mistake is a familiar one. A company leads with its product, engages the first enthusiastic local intermediary it meets, and treats the state as background scenery. In most serious transactions across the region, the state is not scenery. It is a party — through procurement, through regulation, through ownership of the counterparty, or through the quiet architecture of who is actually allowed to decide. A commercial strategy that does not account for this is not a strategy; it is a hope.
Map the institution before the market
Before the commercial case is built, the more important question is how a decision of this kind actually moves: which ministry or agency authorises it, which state-owned enterprise sits in the chain, who carries genuine influence and who merely holds a title, and where a file stalls or advances. This mapping is unglamorous and it is decisive. It is also perishable — relationships and mandates shift, and last year’s map is a liability if mistaken for this year’s.
Choose the partner as a strategic decision
The right local partner can open a market a foreign product never will. Partner selection therefore deserves the same diligence as an acquisition: real capabilities rather than claimed ones, political and financial exposure, integrity and track record, all verified rather than assumed. The enthusiastic, well-connected fixer who appears early is precisely the relationship to examine most carefully.
Compliance is part of the structure, not a constraint on it
Export control, anti-corruption exposure under Belgian, UK and US regimes, local-content and offset obligations — these are not obstacles to be managed at the end. They shape how the entry should be structured from the beginning, and a deal built to be defensible is a deal that survives scrutiny later.
The sequence, in our experience, is the strategy: assess the opportunity honestly, map the institutional terrain, qualify the partner rigorously, structure for compliance and durability — and only then execute commercially. Companies that invert this order, leading with the deal and backfilling the groundwork, are the ones that spend two years and considerable capital discovering what an afternoon of proper mapping would have told them. These markets are open, and rewarding, to those who do the work upstream. The entry is won long before the first contract is signed.