London Economics relationship with SIMPA Marketing Research goes back to 2008. LE’s current engagement in Oman is the strategic study for the privatisation of Muscat Electricity Distribution Company, says Moritz Godel, Associate Director, London Economics, in an interview with Oommen John.
Could you tell us about your presence in the GCC?
We have been active in the GCC since 2007 and Oman has been the focus of our activities since then. We currently have a team working on the privatisation strategy for the electricity distribution sector in Oman and this project is going to run until mid-2016. We recently had the privilege to field two keynote speakers at the OER Finance Summit 2015 in Muscat, for which we brought over the partners in charge of two of our major business areas, Dr. Charlotte Duke, who leads our behavioural economics team and Dr. Paula Ramada, who is in charge of the competition practice. We are exploring opportunities across a number of sectors, including logistics, energy, financial services, telecoms, fisheries as well as public sector opportunities related to planning and fiscal policy.
Your partnership with SIMPA marketing research in Oman?
LE’s relationship with SIMPA Marketing Research goes back to 2008. Our first introduction to SIMPA was while working on a project where we needed to measure travel patterns in Muscat, Nizwa, Sohar and Salalah, as well as intercity travel. We needed a research company that not only had the capacity to cover all of these places, but also be able to get information from different demographics in a culturally sensitive way, and to record complex spatial data alongside data gained from surveys and focus groups. After exploratory meetings with a number of international research providers that came nowhere near being able to provide the capabilities we needed, I came across SIMPA, who immediately impressed me with their professional approach and their knowledge of the Omani market. I am confident in saying that SIMPA was the only firm in Oman capable of delivering on such a complex brief. From this grew a strong partnership that was recently cemented through a Memorandum of Understanding a strategy to expand our activities in the GCC in partnership.
Who are your clients in Oman? What are the specialised services that you provide to them?
Our first projects in Oman were on high-level strategy in the energy and transport sectors for the government of Oman. Our first client was what was the then Ministry of National Economy. We conducted the first comprehensive review of Oman’s electricity sector policy and we developed a comprehensive strategy for the surface transport sector, including urban and inter-urban public transport, road haulage and supporting functions such as traffic monitoring, financing and planning. We have since worked for several Electricity Distribution Companies on successive price control reviews, as well as other entities in the electricity sector.
We are a full-service, specialist economics consultancy. Our core activities are economic and financial analysis, litigation support, policy development and evaluation, business strategy, and regulatory and competition policy. All our consultants are highly trained economists, which means we are able to bring a unique, rigorous perspective to problems across the business and policy spheres. We often work in partnership with other lawyers, engineers and accountants to provide our clients with comprehensive solutions. We always try to incorporate the latest insights from academic economics research into our work, for example through our pioneering use of experimental and behavioural economics in areas such as retail financial services, e-commerce and telecoms.
What are some of the current projects that LE is working on in Oman?
Within Oman, our major current engagement is the strategic study for the privatisation of Muscat Electricity Distribution Company. Together with two of my colleagues, I am advising the Electricity Holding Company on all regulatory and tariff related issues that need to be considered for a potential privatisation. More broadly, we have a very diverse portfolio of projects, including studies for major international companies such as Hyundai, Intel and McDonald’s and well as governments and supra-national organisations such as the European Union. To give you just some examples, I am at the moment leading projects to develop a business case for a start-up providing a satellite-based monitoring system for fishing vessels; to analyse the restrictions on cross-border data transfers for cloud computing providers; to determine the priorities for legislative action to promote economic integration for the European Parliament; and review the effects of harmonisation of customs law in Europe. We also have very active teams working on financial sector regulation, education and labour market issues, and space technologies. Two key areas of our work where I see a lot of interest in the GCC are antitrust and sector regulation as well as the analysis of consumer behaviour using cutting-edge concepts from behavioural economics.
What are the future initiatives planned in Oman and the region?
We are very excited by recent developments in Oman, notably the renewed push for liberalisation in regulated sectors and the emphasis on the role of the private sector and economic diversification more generally. One area that is of great interest to us is the emergence of a state-of-the-art policy environment for consumer protection and competition enforcement in Oman. This is an area where we have a lot of experience from other jurisdictions and which we will monitor very closely. Besides our traditional strengths in infrastructure sectors such as electricity, transport, logistics and telecoms, we see considerable potential in the education sector as well as in health and social care, especially with respect to funding arrangements and financial modelling. Similarly, we see Oman and the GCC catching up quickly when it comes to evidence-based policy making, where we can offer a very broad range of services, from the design of evaluations, regulatory mechanism design and “big data” analytics to experimental studies of consumer behaviour and response to policy changes, for example changes in subsidies to households in the context of general fiscal tightening.