DistributorIQ came out of fifteen years of market entry work across the Middle East and Asia, and one problem that never went away: in the markets where finding the right distributor matters most, nobody has written down who they are.
Every market entry project starts the same way. A client has a product, a target country, and no idea who could sell it there. So somebody spends six weeks assembling a list: trade directories that haven't been updated since 2019, chamber of commerce membership rolls, a few names from an embassy contact, and whatever a competitor's website gives away.
Then the flights start. Meetings get booked with companies whose actual capabilities nobody has checked. Half of them turn out to be too small, wrongly licensed, or already carrying a competing brand. The genuinely good candidate is often the one nobody found, because they don't advertise and they weren't in any directory.
That work is expensive, slow, and gets thrown away the moment the project ends. The next client starts from zero. We got tired of rebuilding the same list.
There is no clever shortcut here, which is the whole point. If this could be scraped, somebody would already have done it and there would be no business.
Trade registries, customs records, licensing bodies, industry associations and local-language sources. Most of it is offline, fragmented, or only exists in Arabic, Bahasa or Burmese.
An analyst checks what the company actually does against what it claims. Licences, warehouse capacity, coverage and the brands it already carries all get confirmed independently.
Everything lands in the same fifty-plus fields, so a distributor in Jeddah and one in Surabaya can be compared on the same terms rather than on the quality of their sales pitch.
Profiles are revisited on a rolling cycle. Where we can't confirm something, the field says so rather than guessing. An empty field is more useful than a confident wrong one.
Every score comes with the criteria and weights behind it. If you disagree with how something was weighted, change it and the ranking moves. Nothing is a black box you're asked to trust.
Profiles carry the drawbacks as well as the strengths. A shortlist that makes every option look excellent is not a shortlist, it's a brochure.
No distributor pays to be listed, ranked higher, or featured. Our revenue comes from the companies searching, which is the only way the rankings can mean anything.
What you're launching and where is commercially sensitive. It isn't shared with distributors, sold on, or used to tip anyone off that you're coming.
We open a market only once the data behind it is good enough to charge for. That makes the map grow slowly, which we think is the right trade.
Browsing the database is free. You only pay when you need the full profiles for your market.