Our Clients · Corporate Clients
Strategic intelligence, risk and due diligence
Support for complex decisions under incomplete information — and on deadline.
How we do it
We assemble “dream teams” of specialists and data to address complex operational and strategic challenges related to the Red Sea basin and MENA states. Every engagement is informed by one or more analytic frameworks — including bias identification, scenario planning, red-teaming, and environmental and social impact analysis.
Our biggest asset is our experts — a meticulously-built pool of regional and technical specialists and management leads, each with career experience in-region. A team of lead experts ‘deconstructs’ the problem, while Big Red™, our proprietary agentic model, mines our experts’ publications and work histories to identify those best equipped to provide actionable insight. The model assists with the formation of tailored queries, while drawing on our custom databases and relevant contextual data. The result is a constantly improving resource that is available to the client to address future issues.
What we offer
Market entry strategy
Regulators, partners, competitors and local conditions, mapped before you commit.
Acquisition due diligence
Who owns and controls the target, and what its documents don't show.
Product design
Shaping an offering to regional demand, regulation and procurement practice.
Supply chain stress testing
Where routes, inputs and suppliers break under disruption, and the alternatives.
Geopolitical risk
Sovereign behavior, conflict spillover, chokepoint disruption.
Risk assessment
Operational, regulatory and security exposure, at the level of the site and the market.
Scenario planning
Plausible futures, the signposts to watch, and what each means for your plans.
Convenings
We also shape the content of summits and conferences: themes and session structure, the right combination of speakers, and proceedings and publications produced with our design partner, Kulturalis.
Sample client profile
An established regional company, or an external company entering the region, facing an urgent, complex logistical or operational issue. It needs to validate that the problem it faces is the one that actually needs solving — not a mis-defined version of it — and to assemble the best available expertise to address it, quickly.
Client Testimonial
“Like having a pop-up specialist division of 30 experts tailored to our project needs. The team moved quickly, worked together extremely well, and delivered recommendations we could act on.”
Past Engagements
- Securing a critical production input. A Red Sea-based manufacturer was losing access to a critical production input when war interrupted its supply. The client faced potentially large financial losses if a stable solution was not found quickly. Company executives wanted (1) a fresh perspective on the legal challenge and recourse, (2) an evaluation of the risk embodied in its existing replacement strategy, and (3) any additional ideas that could be brought to bear, including hybrid sourcing options tied to long-term contracts and swaps. We started with a client situation debrief, relying upon red teaming and scenario-planning leads for framing; our proprietary agentic model stress-tested the problem and identified those in our network best positioned to offer insight; we pulled together a team of highly relevant operational development leads in directly-related industries, who gave their read and generated a series of additional financial structures and deal types, along with actual sources.Read the case study →
- Utility capacity at a development site. A subcontractor to a large tourism and construction development needed to know whether competing projects nearby would constrain utility capacity at its site. The most useful information was not available in a database — it was with local officials and contractors. Our pool experts and regional leads convened a group to fill in the blanks and give the company a much better view of potential constraints and related costs than they had before the engagement.Read the case study →
Red Sea Futures marries three capabilities most clients have to buy separately: research and AI, strategy, and the capacity to implement. Not every engagement needs all three — clients engage the parts they need.
Bring us your most challenging Red Sea and MENA questions.
Test the method against your most pressing question — a 30-minute briefing, no long-term commitment. We've spent decades in the region; it shows in the work.