A client came to us last year with a plan to enter six markets in two years. The plan was sound on paper. Every dossier was budgeted, every local partner identified, every timeline drawn from published authority guidance. Eighteen months later they were live in two markets and had spent most of the budget. Nothing had gone wrong in the way people expect things to go wrong. No submission was rejected. No inspection failed. They had simply filed in the wrong order.
The dependency nobody maps
Market entry plans are usually built market by market. Each one gets a workstream, a budget line and a timeline, and the timelines are drawn in parallel because the markets are independent. Except they are not independent. A registration in one market frequently becomes evidence in another, and the direction of that dependency is not always obvious until you are inside it.
The most common version is reference market logic. Several authorities give faster review, reduced documentation or an abridged pathway when a product is already approved in a recognised reference market. If you file everywhere at once, you have thrown that away. You paid full price for every review when three of them could have been abridged.
Reference approvals that shorten a later review
Certificates of Pharmaceutical Product that can only be issued once a home approval exists
GMP clearances that one authority will accept from another
Local testing waivers that depend on data already accepted elsewhere
Each of these is well documented. The problem is that they are documented per market, in the guidance of the market that grants the benefit — so a team building a six-market plan reads six documents and never sees the graph that connects them.
What sequencing actually looks like
equencing is not simply "do the easy ones first." It is closer to a critical path exercise. You are looking for the filings that unlock the most downstream value, and you accept a slower start in exchange for a faster middle.
Map every market in the plan against what each authority will accept from another
Identify which approvals generate reusable evidence and which consume it
Sequence the evidence generators first, even where they are the slower reviews
Hold the dependent markets until their input exists, rather than filing and waiting
Re-check the map every quarter, because recognition arrangements change
The counter-intuitive part
Teams resist step three because it looks like deliberately choosing to go slower. In the first six months, a sequenced plan produces fewer submissions than a parallel one, and that is visibly worse on a status report. The advantage only appears in months nine to eighteen, when the dependent markets move quickly because their inputs are already in hand.
The plan that looks fastest in month three is almost never the plan that finishes first.
Where this goes wrong in practice
Three failure patterns come up repeatedly.
The first is filing the reference market last because it had the longest review time and the team wanted early wins. Every abridged pathway in the plan then became a full review.
The second is treating the CPP as an administrative step. It is a dependency with its own timeline, and in several markets it must be legalised, which adds weeks that nobody put in the plan.
The third is planning around a recognition arrangement that changed. Reliance frameworks across Asia Pacific and Africa have moved considerably in the last three years, generally in the direction of more reliance, but the detail of what is accepted from whom is not stable. A plan built on last year's map will be wrong somewhere.
What to do differently
Before the first dossier is compiled, build the dependency map for the full market set and put it in front of whoever owns the commercial timeline. Not the regulatory team — the commercial owner, because they are the person who will otherwise ask why nothing has been filed in Kenya yet.
The conversation you want is the one where the commercial team understands that month three looks slow on purpose. If you have that conversation in month one it is a strategy. If you have it in month nine it is an excuse.
None of this requires new capability. It requires the map to exist before the plan is signed, and it requires one person to own it as markets are added.