About

From Dubai,
we open the next market for Korean companies

Most of the problems Korean companies face in the Middle East come from execution, not information. Regulations are a search away. How those regulations are applied at customs, and which buyers actually pay, you only learn on the ground. We are on the ground.

What we do

Turning Point MEA (Middle East and Africa) is a corporate innovation consultancy headquartered in Dubai. We work with leading companies and founders to build, grow and scale new businesses.

Dubai is a base from which any market in the Middle East and Africa is within reach. We started in the UAE and have extended projects into Saudi Arabia, Oman, Qatar and Egypt.

Team

Daniel Han

Founder & CEO

Starting at KOTRA Dubai and continuing through LG Electronics MEA Regional Headquarters and Samsung Electronics Dubai, he has led business development for Korean companies in the Middle East for over 10 years. In 2023 he founded Turning Point MEA, where he oversees clients' Middle East market entry strategy and local execution. He works on the principle that advice should not stop at advice, and sees it through to execution on the ground.

Sangwook Lee

Managing Partner

Over 16 years at Samsung Electronics Dubai, he headed GCC product and sales and served as Galaxy product owner, experiencing the Middle East consumer market from the inside. He then served as Director at a medical device startup, and today he is an advisor to a seed VC while leading the build-out of local distribution networks for B2C and B2B products at Turning Point MEA.

Jaeeun Lee

Head of Korea

As Head of Strategic Planning at Yello Mobile and CEO of Yello Marketing China, he ran the official agencies for Baidu and Tencent. He went on to found a hospitality tech startup and led it to an exit, and today he heads a SaaS startup while serving as Head of Korea at Turning Point MEA, managing relationships with Korean companies and public institutions.

Ravi Lakhani

Partner, Investment & Governance

Across UK private equity he worked through the full investment lifecycle in healthcare and real estate, supporting transactions of up to USD 45M. He now leads the Middle East for ABRA Ventures, a USD 100M fund investing in deep tech across MENA, Africa and Europe, and advises boards in regulated industries on AI governance and risk oversight. At Turning Point MEA he leads investment raising and governance structuring.

Mohammed AlJilani

Partner, Head of Saudi Arabia and Jordan

Mohammed helps Korean companies establish and win business in the Kingdom's public, semi-public and private sectors, drawing on more than twenty years inside and alongside government across Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Jordan — most recently a national spending efficiency programme spanning 83 government entities and over USD 293 billion in public spending. Founding Partner of 10X Consulting. Based between Riyadh and Amman.

Where the team comes from

People who have worked inside large corporates, public agencies and startups, now based in Dubai

Between us we have run overseas business at a large corporate, export support at a public agency, due diligence at an accounting firm, and startup decisions taken as the funding ran down. So we already know what a company needs signed off, what an agency needs to account for, and what a founder has to give up and when.

Samsung

PwC

Baidu

LG Electronics

KOTRA

Startup

Dubai office