Twelve months ago, Tom Foley evaluated 14 different markets.
AI infrastructure. European energy. Latin American fintech. Several others he will not name, because the analysis embarrassed him later.
Only Saudi Arabia cleared every filter.
“A government openly committing hundreds of billions to attract foreign manufacturers. Incentives so generous the financial case almost makes itself. And almost nobody in the international business world has done the maths on it yet. That last point is the rarest signal of all.”
The result is CrossBridge Partners, the first specialist Build-to-Suit industrial developer in Saudi Arabia focused entirely on international manufacturers entering the Kingdom.
THE PROBLEM HE IS SOLVING
Most foreign manufacturers selling into Saudi Arabia today go through a distributor. They pay high import duties, give away 25 to 40% of their Saudi revenues in distributor margin, and watch home country tax remove another 20 to 30% from whatever lands back.
By the time SAR 30 million of Saudi customer revenue reaches their P&L, they are banking around SAR 5 million.
CrossBridge changes that maths.
Move the same product into local Saudi production, under a Special Economic Zone like KAEC or SILZ, and the cost structure collapses. Components attract close to zero duty. Direct sales remove the distributor. Corporate tax falls to 5% for 20 years at KAEC, or 0% for 50 years at SILZ.
Same customers. Same product. Same SAR 30 million of revenue. SAR 18 to SAR 22 million in net profit.
“That is not a marketing claim,” Foley says. “It is the maths.”
THE TRACK RECORD
Foley is not a consultant by background. He is a serial entrepreneur with two decades of operating experience, including an e-commerce business he scaled to $10 million in revenue and $2 million in profit inside the first 12 months.
He is unambiguous about why it worked.
“Almost none of it was my brilliance. The market did the heavy lifting. Markets with real structural pull reward decent execution. Markets without it punish brilliant execution every time.”
That conviction is what brought him to Saudi Arabia.
WHY NOW
Saudi Arabia is targeting 36,000 factories by 2035, up from roughly 12,000 today. The government has put forward extraordinary incentives to attract foreign operators. The zones are already filling.
“Industrial zones that were open desert 18 months ago are now operational. German, Indian, and South Korean manufacturers are already breaking ground. The incentive packages are at their most generous now because the Saudi government wants the early names on the map.”
He pauses.
“Most international boardrooms think they have five years to make a Saudi decision. That estimate is at least two years too long.”
THE BIGGER VIEW
For all the modelling that sits inside CrossBridge’s work, Foley’s read on Saudi Arabia is more personal.
“Riyadh is one of the most welcoming cities I have visited anywhere in the world. The gap between what people in Europe imagine Saudi Arabia to be, and what you actually experience on the ground, is enormous. That gap is a huge part of why so few international manufacturers have moved here yet.”
The ones who arrive first, he says, will hold the strongest positions in the Kingdom a decade from now.
“This is the biggest mispriced market I have seen in 20 years. I do not say that lightly.”
Tom Foley is the founder of CrossBridge Partners. He can be reached at tom@crossbridge-partners.com.
