Observer

Trading · Manufacturing · Exports

The pipeline is the record, not the fifty cars

A trading desk is trained to doubt a headline number before it doubts the small one. On the MAYS record, the fifty is the modest figure and the 4,000 is the one to split.

In the Muscat Daily interview of 8 August, co-founder Haider bin Adnan al-Zaabi put the company's export pipeline at about 4,000 vehicles, and then put a number on part of it: 1,300 in North Africa. The same passage says the company is at different stages of entering seven markets.

Take the arithmetic the way a desk takes it. A pipeline of 4,000 with 1,300 attached to a named region is 2,700 unaccounted, or 67.5 per cent of the pipeline. Of the 1,300 that is left, only the region is stated. Nothing in the interview pairs a country with a number.

Against that, fifty delivered cars is the only number in the record with a buyer category on it at all: government bodies and private companies. It is small, and it is the part we can see the shape of.

What the six weeks later does and does not do

The Uzbek agreement of 30 September — $17.9m, 750 vehicles, signed at the embassy in Tashkent before Oman's ambassador Wafa al-Busaidi — arrives after the interview and is reported by Oman Observer, which noted that MAYS named neither partner nor model.

Set the two side by side and the pipeline gets more specific, not less. 750 of the 4,000 now sits in one country. But the partner is unnamed and there is no delivery date attached, so what has been established is an intention with a price on it, not a shipment.

That is the useful read. Six weeks after saying it had orders in seven markets and named a region, the company signed one of them — visible, dated, at an embassy — and still did not say who the buyer is. That is a step. It is not four thousand steps.

The 1,300

North Africa is the region the company was most specific about, and the one it has shown least for. The interview gives the volume, no country list, and the pipeline is drawn from there. If the September signing is the working pattern, 1,300 in an unnamed set of North African markets could take years of embassy signings to become names.

There is nothing wrong with that as a plan. A pipeline is meant to be unspent. The error a reader makes is to read 4,000 as production and to read fifty as a stall; the two sit at either end of one supply line and belong to one story, which is what our earlier joining piece said.