How to raise prices with existing clients without losing them
A price increase with existing clients is a notice decision before it is a pricing one. Segmentation, timing, wording, and which accounts to expect to lose.
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BDGL / Insights / Market entry
Vision 2030 is usually discussed as a list of giga projects. The published statistics point somewhere less photogenic and considerably more reachable for a mid sized services firm.
Every deck about Saudi Arabia opens with the same three renders. They are not useless, but they are a poor guide to where a mid sized B2B firm can actually sell, because the visible megaprojects are procured through a small number of very large contracts and the qualification bar is set accordingly.
The published national statistics tell a different and more actionable story. What follows is drawn from GASTAT releases rather than from consultancy forecasts, which matters because the two disagree more often than either admits.
GASTAT reported real GDP growth of 3.0 per cent for the first quarter of 2026, and the composition is the interesting part. Non oil activities were the main contributor to that growth, adding 1.7 percentage points against 0.8 from oil activities and 0.3 from government activities.
Within non oil, the fastest growing category was financial and insurance activities together with business services at 5.4 per cent, followed by manufacturing excluding oil refining at 4.0 per cent. For a firm selling professional or technical services, that first category is not a coincidence. It is the part of the economy that buys what you sell.
GASTAT puts the digital economy at 16.0 per cent of Saudi GDP in 2024, up from 15.6 per cent in 2023. A 0.4 point move in one year sounds modest until you look at what sits underneath it.
ICT sector operating revenues reached SAR 249.8 billion in 2024, of which telecommunications accounted for SAR 133.9 billion and computer programming for SAR 31.1 billion. The trade figures move faster still: ICT imports rose from SAR 54.9 billion in 2023 to SAR 67.9 billion in 2024, a 23.5 per cent increase, while ICT exports and re exports went from SAR 11.8 billion to SAR 25.8 billion, a 118 per cent rise.
The import number is the one to sit with. A market importing SAR 67.9 billion of ICT goods in a year is a market buying capability it does not yet produce, and that gap is the commercial opening for a foreign supplier. The export number tells you the gap is closing, which is a reason to move now rather than in three years.
Read together, the figures point at business services, financial services and anything ICT adjacent, rather than at construction and tourism where the headlines concentrate. That is a more accessible target for a firm without a Riyadh office and a decade of reference projects.
It also suggests a sequencing. The buyers growing fastest are themselves service businesses, which means they procure the way service businesses procure: on demonstrated capability and referenceability rather than on lowest tender. That favours a seller with a narrow, provable specialism over a generalist with a broad brochure.
The part most entry plans underprice. Selling into Saudi Arabia at any scale means a registered presence, and a registered presence means engaging with workforce nationalisation requirements rather than treating them as a later problem. This is a live and frequently updated regime, and the specific quota that applies to your activity and headcount is a question for the Ministry of Human Resources and Social Development rather than for an article, because the rules change on a cadence that outpaces published guides.
Treat that as a real line in the entry budget rather than a compliance footnote. The firms that struggle are usually the ones that modelled the revenue opportunity accurately and the cost of being allowed to pursue it not at all.
We have written separately about what sellers get wrong when entering the Saudi market, and about the registration wall in front of government software sales, which is the same problem in its most acute form.
One practical warning. In this market the person who takes your first meeting is frequently not the person who can approve the purchase, and the gap between those two is wider than in Egypt or the UAE. Budget for a longer qualification cycle and for more stakeholders than your pipeline model assumes, or you will forecast confidently and close late.
The composition of that group is worth mapping deliberately rather than discovering. Our note on who is really in the room covers the roles to expect, and the Saudi version of that room tends to include finance and a compliance or localisation stakeholder earlier than sellers anticipate.
For firms based in Cairo the temptation is to treat Saudi expansion as automatic, because the ticket sizes are visibly larger. The costs are also larger, and the answer is not obvious for every business. Khaled Badr has written a useful non consultant take on whether to sell in Egypt or Saudi Arabia, and the framing there, that the decision is about which market your delivery model actually fits, is the right one.
Our own view is narrower: if your margin depends on price competitiveness, Saudi entry will erode it, because the cost of being present eats the premium. If your margin depends on a specialism that is scarce there, the same cost is recoverable within a year.
Three things this piece does not tell you. First, GDP composition is not addressable market. A sector growing at 5.4 per cent may still be closed to a foreign supplier for reasons no statistic captures, and the only way to find out is to talk to buyers in it.
Second, the figures above are national and lagging. The digital economy share is a 2024 measurement and the GDP release covers the first quarter of 2026, so neither describes the market you will enter next quarter. They describe direction, which is what they are good for.
Third, we have deliberately not quoted a Saudization percentage for your sector. Those quotas are revised on a rolling basis and a figure quoted here would be wrong often enough to be a liability. Get it from the ministry, dated, in writing, before it enters your budget.