Sizing the Active Engine Population in a Gulf Market

Issue

A global engine manufacturer and its distributor in a Gulf market shared a blind spot: neither could say how many of their engines were actually running in the country, or who was running them. Service and parts planning, territory coverage and growth targets all rested on a number nobody could produce. Registration data does not exist for industrial engines and gensets, and equipment moves between sites and owners without a paper trail.

Research solution

We built the number from the ground up. Face to face interviews across every region of the country, with the people who own and maintain the equipment: oil and gas operators, rental fleets, contractors, telecom, government and hospitality. Baseline interviews for reach, longer in-depth interviews for the reasoning behind maintenance and repair decisions, and a purchase exercise at the end of each one.

Alongside the fieldwork, calls to potential users who were not yet customers, and open-source analysis of imports, projects and tenders. We applied a scrappage factor so the estimate counted engines still working rather than engines ever sold.