FrameworkLaunch & access18 Sept 2026Eight pages

The Launch Sequence

Who does what, and when, to launch a medicine in the Gulf and Southeast Asia. One sequence for specialty care, one for primary care, because the route to the first order is not the same.

Who this is for
Affiliate general managers and commercial leads, and the cross-functional team around them: regulatory, market access, medical, supply, commercial, sales and finance. Most useful if you have just been told a product is coming, or if you are running the same launch plan in specialty and primary care.

Almost every launch plan I have seen in this region is built around the approval date. Money does not start then. It starts when a hospital or a ministry places the first order, and that is usually nine to eighteen months later. Nobody owns that gap, so nobody closes it.

Registration got fast. Saudi Arabia aims to clear a file in thirty working days, Indonesia in ninety. Everything after it did not. The committee that decides what gets paid for still meets when it meets. The tender still opens when it opens. And the local manufacturing rules quietly decide whether you can compete on price at all.

Count back from the first order, not from approval.

So the document is a grid. Columns are windows of time before the first order. Rows are functions. Each box is what that team has to have finished. Put a name against every box, a person not a function. Every empty box is somewhere the launch will slip, and you will only find out later.

The difference

Specialty and primary care are not the same launch

S

Specialty care

You can win one institution and start earning before the national listing exists. Large centres have their own formulary committees and budgets.

What wins Clinical conviction at two or three centres. Medical affairs matters from the start. The sales team is small, senior and hired after the committee decides.
P

Primary care

There is no shortcut. Nothing meaningful happens before national listing, and once you are listed the decision is price and availability.

What wins Price, and being in stock. Local manufacturing rules often decide the tender. A campaign run before listing teaches people to ask for something they cannot get.

If you only have twelve months

This is the normal case. You get twelve to eighteen months notice, and the price and the filing order were decided somewhere else. So the question is what to drop, what to speed up, and what you must not let slip.

Drop a new local study from scratch, a new factory, and any hope of changing the global price. Speed up local evidence by assembling it from hospital records, registries, claims and nearby countries in weeks rather than years, and buy your local manufacturing answer through a contract with a plant that is already licensed. Protect three dates that do not move: the fast route window, the committee paperwork deadline, and the tender window.

In specialty, almost all of a launch still works at twelve months. In primary care much less does, because nothing moves before listing. If you have twelve months in primary care, the honest conversation with global is about the year one number, not about working harder.

The single most useful move costs nothing: have the local dossier finished and the agent appointed before the FDA or EMA decision lands, so you file the day it does. It buys three to twelve months and gets missed because the global filing plan never asks for it.
Eight pages

Both sequences in full

The complete grid for specialty and for primary care, what changes between them, the twelve month version and eight moves that buy time.

Download the PDF →

Run it against your own launch

If your plan dates revenue from approval, or applies one sequence to both care settings, that is the kind of thing I am useful for.

Tell me what needs to change →