Via Gavin Gibbon in agbi.com: Saudi Arabia remains a boom town for the global consultancy industry, but experts have warned it is no longer the land of milk and honey for international operators and there is now a tighter hold being placed on budgets. The Saudi consultancy market, the largest in the GCC, expanded by 18.2 percent in 2023 with revenues reaching a record $3.2 billion. Opportunities remain, but Saudi Arabia is scaling back its trillion-dollar Vision 2030 giga-projects, and Dane Albertelli, a London-based senior research analyst focused on the industry at Source Global Research, says consultants are now having to “prove their worth”. “I think the days of the blank cheque consulting projects are over in Saudi,” he tells AGBI. “I’d say consultants need to rein in what they think and their expectations. There’s no longer an infinite money tree.”
