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Two numbers published this year explain why market entry research has moved back up the agenda. Global foreign direct investment rose 6% to $1.6 trillion in 2025, ending two years of decline. And the global insights industry reached close to US$165 billion in 2025, growing 6.4% — figures released this month in the industry’s annual global study. Research spending and commitment decisions move together, because companies study a country properly in the year before they put capital into it. The useful question now is which markets are drawing that study.
Why is market entry research growing again?
Because the capital it supports started moving again. Developing economies took in $901 billion in 2025, more than half of all global FDI, and inflows to the least developed economies rose 21% to $43 billion.
Our analysis of client briefs shows the same pattern from the demand side: the questions arriving are country-level rather than regional, and they arrive earlier in the decision — before a site is chosen, not after.
That is a healthy shift. A blended regional average hides a wide spread of growth rates, regulatory regimes and buyer behaviour, and a structured market survey at country level is what closes that gap.
Which regions are building momentum?
Four stand out on the current evidence. They are listed alphabetically, in no particular order, and each brings something distinct.
- Africa drew about $70 billion of FDI in 2025 roughly a third above its 2010–2024 average. Its distinctive strength is demographic depth and resource access, and entry questions here usually centre on distribution reach and local sourcing.
- Developing Asia received $644 billion, around 40% of the global total, with South-East Asia becoming the largest recipient sub-region and India’s inflows rising 44%. The insights industry in Asia Pacific has also been growing faster than the global average, with Australia, India, Indonesia, Kazakhstan and Vietnam each posting above-regional research growth in recent years. That matters practically: local research infrastructure makes a credible entry study faster and cheaper to run.
- Latin America and the Caribbean took $188 billion, up 14%. Its strength is proximity to North American demand plus deep agri-food and mining value chains, which makes it a natural fit for nearshoring and supply-resilience studies.
- The Middle East brings a different kind of momentum: around 600 multinationals have licensed regional headquarters in Saudi Arabia since the programme launched in 2021, supported by a 30-year package offering 0% corporate income tax and withholding tax for qualifying headquarters. Saudi Arabia also issued 438 industrial licences in July 2026 alone, worth about $1.28 billion, with 189 factories beginning production in the same month.
What these four have in common: each is now generating the kind of granular, verifiable data — licensing records, investment registries, production starts — that makes a rigorous entry study possible rather than speculative.
What does a market entry that compounded look like?
Hyundai’s three decades in India are a useful illustration, because the payoff came from staged commitment rather than a single bet.
The starting point was a conventional manufacturing presence built around plants in Chennai and Anantapur. The turning move was widening that footprint from assembly into local R&D and supplier development, rather than treating India purely as a production site.
In October 2026 the company opened a new facility in Pune, Maharashtra, which it describes as people-centric by design. About US$1.14 billion is being phased into the Pune site and roughly US$700 million into R&D infrastructure, within a broader US$15.5 billion commitment to India’s automotive ecosystem across 2026 to 2031.
The result is measurable. Pune adds 170,000 vehicles and 150,000 engines a year, lifting Hyundai’s Indian production capacity to 1.4 million vehicles annually, alongside a cumulative four million vehicle exports from India since 1999.
The lesson for anyone planning an entry: the sequence was study, presence, localisation, then scale — and each step generated the evidence that justified the next.
How do these regions complement each other?
They are not substitutes, and treating them as competing options is where entry plans usually lose value.
Africa complements the others on demographics and raw material access. Developing Asia complements them on manufacturing depth and mature research infrastructure. Latin America complements them on proximity and agricultural and mineral value chains. The Middle East complements them on headquarters functions, logistics corridors and industrial licensing speed.
A multi-polar map is good news for both sides of a transaction. It gives manufacturers more than one viable route to the same customer, and it gives buyers more than one qualified source for the same specification. Our consulting services team increasingly sizes two or three of these in parallel rather than one in isolation.
What does this mean for manufacturers and buyers?
For manufacturers, the practical move is to size demand before the capital commitment, and to phase entry as study, pilot, then commit. Country-level data beats a blended regional average every time, and local specification should be tested early rather than retrofitted. A custom research engagement scoped to two candidate countries usually costs a fraction of a single misplaced facility.
For buyers and end-users, the same shift widens the supplier panel, shortens lead times through local specification, and firms up pricing as new capacity arrives. A fair question to put to any supplier pitching a regional roadmap is simply what entry evidence sits behind it — and our published client case studies show what that evidence looks like in practice.
How we researched this
Public investment figures come from the World Investment Report 2026 and industry size figures from the 2026 edition of the global insights industry study; both are cited in full below. Our own interpretation, client-brief observations and country prioritisation are drawn from Cognitive Market Research and Consulting’s Full Truth methodology — a 70:30 primary-to-secondary ratio, 54 expert interviews, coverage across 39+ countries and 10,400+ validated data points, each reviewed by a minimum of two independent domain experts. You can review our research methodology in detail, and explore the datasets through our Athenaeum dashboard. Where a figure is approximate or a regional grouping overlaps another, we have said so in the text.
Where to start
Market entry research pays for itself when it happens before the commitment, not alongside it. Four regions are currently generating both the investment flows and the data quality that make a rigorous study worthwhile, and none of them requires an exclusive bet.
If you are a manufacturer weighing a first facility, a second sourcing base or a regional headquarters, we can size any country, segment or competitor set to your exact scope. If you are a buyer building a 2027 supplier panel, we can give you the country-level view behind the suppliers you are being offered. Talk to an analyst or request the free sample pages for any market in our catalogue.
