Middle East & Africa Management Consulting Services Market - Growth, Trends, COVID-19 Impact, and Forecasts (2022 - 2027)

Middle East & Africa Management Consulting Services Market - Growth, Trends, COVID-19 Impact, and Forecasts (2022 - 2027)

The Middle East & Africa Management Consulting Services Market is expected to register a CAGR of 6.5 % during the forecast period (2022-2027). The COVID-19 pandemic has negatively impacted multiple industries, including management consulting. To recover from the impact, consultancies have been devising various work opportunities and new business strategies and adapting to the post-pandemic scenario.​ The effect of the pandemic on different economies may also provide some options to management consulting firms. However, it is expected that multiple organizations will try to invest their resources into the current operations that demand the most attention without allocating resources for consultancies. ​

Key Highlights

• There is a growing need for management consulting services, owing to the strong economic growth in the MEA markets, the regulatory reforms in the financial sector, outsourced back-end operations to low-cost economies, and public investments.
• Several prominent consulting firms are engaging in expansion activities. For instance, in June 2021, PwC announced a new international strategy focusing on environmental, social, and governance services. PwC Global, an accounting and consulting network, plans to invest USD 12 billion and add 100,000 people in the next five years. The investment budget significantly increased over the last five years, when PwC invested USD 7.4 billion, and its annual revenues grew by 20% to USD 43 billion. Over the past five years, the firm's workforce increased by over 25%, to 284,000 people. The planned 100,000-person net growth is poised to bring a headcount increase of more than one-third.
• Digital transformation is one of the major drivers providing a push to the growth of consultancy firms in the region. For instance, in May 2021, Abu-Dhabi-based district cooling specialist, Tabreed, announced that it had initiated a new digital transformation. Therefore, it has chosen SAP and Deloitte as partners, focusing on data analytics and operational improvements.
• Moreover, the region is also witnessing growth from government contracts and demand from the industrial sector. For instance, in February 2021, Ashghal (Public Works Authority) announced that it had awarded Egis with a new contract to provide them with professional consultancy services in connection with designing, building, operating, and maintaining the future Qatari Integrated Industrial Waste-Water treatment plant.
• The complexity is also increasing because clients are gaining better insights into their projects and demanding significant control. The evolution of mobile technology has, for instance, caused a substantial shift in the sector, enabling stakeholders to gain instant access to project information from any location. Hence, project managers face the major challenge of staying on top of their projects within a more dynamic data environment.

Key Market TrendsAdoption of BI and Advanced Data Management Strategies Expected to Drive the Market Demand

• As a digital revolution is underway in the management consulting services industry, there are tremendous opportunities to enhance the client experience, and advising clients on leveraging analytics is now an essential part of modern consulting. Consultants are acquiring new skill sets to stay ahead of the disruption.​
• Data analytics is a significantly evolving technology that harnesses statistics, AI, and advanced market insights to identify meaningful patterns in large data sets. Smartly deployed analytics provide considerable insights into a company's performance metrics and the complex and often bewildering changes happening around them. In MEA, the corporate spending on analytics consulting is increasing significantly, and the investments are split between developing in-house capabilities and spending on external consultants.​
• In the next five years, technology is expected to be one of the primary drivers that will provide opportunities to consultancy firms in terms of strategic and IT consultancy. Other drivers include increasing mergers and acquisitions that are on the rise, due to the growth of certain industries such as FMCG and healthcare, during the spread of COVID-19 across the region.
• Furthermore, Management consulting provides IT transformation services to enterprises, banks, and other organizations to address rising stakeholder expectations and declining budgets. Such services contain finding critical technologies, setting an IT plan, systematizing, merging, and harmonizing IT solutions through business divisions in a cost-effective model.
• The development of a new sense of quality is innovating the efforts to establish a new perception of quality, and these aspects might increase the market growth. However, growing prices and shrinking margins, as well as breakthroughs in artificial intelligence that have the potential to replace management consultants, may limit industry growth.

Saudi Arabia Expected to Witness Significant Market Share

• The country is a growing market for consultancy services, majorly due to the increasing business potential and technological and financial investments in the region. With growing opportunities for IT, economic, and management consulting, vendors in the market are trying to gain maximum market share in the country.
• Moreover, the government in Saudi Arabia has put some restrictions on foreign consulting firms conducting business in the country. For instance, in March 2021, the government doubled down on its 2019 verdict banning foreign public sector consultants. It announced that by 2024, all international companies would be barred from doing business with the government unless their regional headquarters were in the Kingdom. Regulations such as the above are expected to strengthen the domestic market during the forecast period.
• Furthermore, the region has a high concentration of foreign consultancy firms such as Bain and Company, Tata Consultancy Services, KPMG, Alvarez and Marsal, Accenture, Analysys Mason, Booz Allen Hamilton, Boston Consulting Group, etc., among many others, which is further expected to increase the business potential of the region due to these regulations.
• Additionally, the government sector is a fast-growing segment for all consulting firms in the Middle East, including Saudi Arabia, as firms step in to help governments undertake massive investment and economic development projects such as Saudi Arabia's Vision 2030.
• Moreover, in April 2021, KPMG and Oracle brought their global partnership to the Saudi market to help businesses leverage the power of the cloud and explore emerging technologies such as Artificial Intelligence, the Internet of Things, and Machine Learning. The new partnership is a way of capitalizing on the momentum of increased IT and cloud spending. KPMG's Insights Centre and Oracle's Innovation Hub in Riyadh will combine to help private and public sector organizations explore cloud applications in emerging technologies such as AI, IoT, and others.
• Furthermore, in January 2021, Tata Consultancy Services announced that it would acquire GE's stake in TCS Saudi Arabia for USD 12,471, following GE's planned exit from the partnership.

Competitive Landscape

The Middle East & Africa Management Consulting Services Market is moderately competitive, with a considerable number of regional and global players. Key players include Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu Limited, Accenture PLC, McKinsey & Company, and PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP.

• November 2021 - Accenture acquired AppsPro, a prominent Oracle Cloud implementation provider in Saudi Arabia. The acquisition expands Accenture’s Oracle Cloud capabilities globally, helping to deliver additional value to clients in the Middle East on their to the cloud.

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• The market estimate (ME) sheet in Excel format
• 3 months of analyst support

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