Nobody in a Gulf boardroom needed a communications consultant to tell them to keep a low profile in March. With the Strait of Hormuz effectively closed to normal commercial traffic and the national position being set at government level, the sensible course for any chief executive was to defer to it, say nothing that added to the noise, and get on with running the business. Most did exactly that, and in the first weeks it was the right call.
Six months on, the calculation is different. The region is still dealing with the commercial consequences of the disruption, but for individual companies, silence can no longer be treated simply as the safest option. For businesses looking ahead to investment, fundraising or a future listing, the question is whether the market knows enough about them to trust them when it matters.
Shipping through the Strait is still a fraction of what it was before the war. The agreement signed in June to end the war collapsed in July, tankers were attacked again in September and Brent crude spent most of the month above $100 a barrel. Nobody can tell a boardroom when normal shipping will return. In the meantime, the costs, customers and risks facing businesses across the region have changed. A fortnight of silence in a shock is prudence. Six months of it, in your own name, while all of that was happening around your company, is a decision, and it is one the market can now see.
The trouble was always going to begin the day the story stopped being about the region and started being about your company. Some chairmen have been waiting for the Strait to settle before that day arrives. It has already arrived.
The editor in Dubai, the business desk in DIFC and the producer in London at twenty past five in the morning do not automatically know your chief executive. They have never used their number and have no reason to give a company they barely know the benefit of the doubt. You are a stranger, and strangers get the worst version of every story.
This matters more now than it has for years, and the reason is money rather than manners. The IPO market tells you how long the quiet may last. In June, Saudi contractor Mutlaq Al Ghowairi postponed its planned flotation after completing institutional book building. At the end of August, three more Saudi companies were reported to have scrapped near term IPO plans amid concerns about investor demand. Also in June, HSBC's regional chief said the bank expected Gulf listings to resume in the fourth quarter once peace held. Peace did not hold, and the bank has yet to close a Gulf IPO this year.
The demand has not gone away. ADX said only this month that it has seen "tremendous" listing demand over the past five years and expects more IPOs from Abu Dhabi and beyond. The timetable may have moved, but the preparation has not.
Many of the businesses preparing for that future will be family companies that have never had to explain themselves in public, and a quarterly results call is a very different room from a family board. When the window does open properly, investors will not encounter these businesses for the first time through a prospectus. They will search for the chief executive, look at what the company has said publicly and ask what kind of business it showed itself to be when conditions were difficult.
Alongside them sit the listed companies that have learned, through months of the region being on the front page, that international investors want to hear from the company itself, in its own voice. Those investors do not readily distinguish between a well run business and one they have simply never heard from.
Being unknown used to be free in this market. It is now a cost of capital.
And yet reputation still sits, in most companies here, a rung below finance and two below legal, in the hands of a marketing department measured on how often the company's name appears. I have been in this industry seventeen years, and I will say what most of my peers will not, which is that we built that machine. We taught boards to count mentions and call the total a reputation. I have sat through enough review meetings watching a number climb on a slide, knowing it meant nothing, to have earned the right to say so. Coverage is an input, not an outcome. A company hoping to raise a billion dirhams on the ADX when the window reopens, with a chairman nobody has heard speak, will find that none of those mentions helps.
What helps is dull and it takes time. It is a chief executive who agreed two years ago to say something about the market every couple of months, in their own words, with an opinion a competitor could disagree with. It is a business editor in Abu Dhabi, Dubai, Riyadh or London who has that person's number and has used it three times when nothing was wrong, so that when something is wrong it is a call between two people who know each other. And it is a board that has agreed, before the phone rings, who speaks, what they will not say and who they call first.
None of it costs much. All of it has to be done in the quiet, and a deferred listing is the last quiet these companies are going to get.
Between now and the middle of December, ADIPEC in Abu Dhabi and GITEX in Dubai will fill the halls, and the companies attending will push hundreds of announcements into a handful of weeks. Having sent a fair few of those in my time, I know where they go. The journalists I know delete them in batches. They read instead the interview with somebody who was useful to them when the story was difficult, or the piece from a chief executive who has an argument rather than an announcement.
The Gulf has spent six months demonstrating the resilience of much of its infrastructure, institutions and businesses under extraordinary pressure. What many individual companies have not yet demonstrated is who they are in their own voice.
Who speaks for a company, and what they are prepared to say when the news is against them, is a board decision now, with a price attached. It has to be taken before the listing, not after the first bad quarter.
Or a chairman can wait for the phone to ring, from a desk that does not know him, and find out what silence costs when it is his alone.
Sharon Bannerton is the founder of Bannerton, an independent, founder-led communications consultancy across Ireland and the Gulf. She holds the Institute of Directors Diploma in Company Direction with Distinction.