How to size the market for your business in Saudi Arabia from official data

The three layers

• Total market (TAM): all the spending on this kind of product or service.
• Serviceable market (SAM): the part you can actually reach: your city, your segment or your channel.
• Your realistic share (SOM): what you yourself can sell in your first year or two, with your capacity and your budget.

The rule: every number either has a source and a date, or is marked as an assumption. The third layer is usually an assumption; what matters is that you know it and write it down.

Free official sources

A worked example: a specialty coffee shop in Riyadh

The official figures below are taken from their sources, with their dates. Everything else is an assumption, clearly marked and for illustration only, so put your own numbers in its place.

1. 1Demand in the Kingdom (source): in the week ending 30 May 2026, point-of-sale spending on “restaurants and cafés” reached SAR 1.97 billion, or 13.7% of a total of SAR 14.4 billion. (Argaam, from SAMA data)
2. 2Riyadh’s share (source + assumption): Riyadh accounted for 31% of the value of all point-of-sale transactions that week. If we assume its share of restaurant and café spending is the same (this is an assumption; it is more accurate to pull the Riyadh series for this sector directly from SAMA’s detailed data), Riyadh’s spending on them was about 0.31 × SAR 1.97 billion ≈ SAR 0.61 billion that week.
3. 3From a week to a year (assumption): one week does not represent the year, because spending rises around payday and holidays. Add up 52 actual weeks from the series. For illustration only: SAR 0.61 billion × 52 ≈ SAR 32 billion a year for restaurants and cafés in Riyadh, a rough figure for the total market at city level, nothing more.
4. 4The serviceable market (assumption): specialty coffee is a small part of “restaurants and cafés”, and no official figure for that share is published. To estimate it, compare the number of active commercial registers for cafés with the number for restaurants in Riyadh in the Ministry of Commerce’s open data, use the ratio as a first estimate, and write “assumption” next to it.
5. 5Your realistic share (bottom-up, with assumed figures for illustration): for a single café, work from its capacity, not from the size of the market: cups a day × average price per cup × trading days. For example: 150 cups × SAR 18 × 300 days = SAR 810,000 a year. These are not researched figures; replace them with what you see at competitors in your neighbourhood, by counting their customers at different times of day.
6. 6A sense check: compare your share with the serviceable market in your neighbourhood and your city. If your plan needs a large part of it, the assumption needs reviewing before anything else.

A checklist before you rely on the number

• Every number has a source link and a date next to it, or the word “assumption”.
• You used a time series covering at least a year, not a single week.
• You worked out your share from your operating capacity, not as a percentage of a huge market.
• You looked at how dense the competition is in your area before choosing the location.