Entering the market now: what has changed

The standard market entry checklist — company registration, banking, tax registration, a local partner, distribution — is still correct and is no longer sufficient. Four items have been added by circumstance.

Insurance, first and properly

Property and war risk cover for assets, political risk cover for the investment, cargo cover for goods in transit. Find out what is available and at what cost before committing, because the answer shapes the business case.

Energy autonomy

Any premises needs a plan for operating through an outage: a generator sized for the actual load, fuel storage, and for offices an uninterruptible supply for network and communications.

Budget it as capital expenditure at the outset. Companies that treated it as an afterthought bought generators at the worst price in the worst week.

Staffing and mobilisation

Understand the reservation rules, which allow certain employees in defined activities to be deferred, and the documentation they require. Plan for the absence of key people and cross-train accordingly.

Recruitment now competes with remote work for foreign employers, which has changed salary expectations for skilled roles.

Contracting

Force majeure clauses drafted for these conditions rather than copied from a template. Payment terms that account for banking restrictions. And a governing law and dispute forum chosen deliberately.

Location

Where the business sits matters more than it used to: proximity to the western border, energy reliability, availability of shelter for staff and the local labour market.

What has not changed

Verify your counterparty, own your customer relationship, get the documents right and put someone you trust on the ground. That was the advice twenty years ago and it still is.

The four items added to the list of five years ago are the shortest summary of how doing business in this country has changed. The first thing I now tell an investor is not the tax structure but insurance and energy autonomy. I have applied it in my own facilities — a generator and a fuel store are no longer a backup but effectively part of the operating licence.