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FADI GHANDOUR
The '90s are commonly dismissed as "the lost decade" for Arab economies, an age of missed chances and dwindling foreign investment. Not so for Fadi Ghandour. Over the past 20 years, the 46-year-old entrepreneur has built up his company, Aramex, from a modest Jordan-based courier service into the Mediterranean's premier logistics business. Returning to Amman after college in the early '80s, Ghandour saw a niche for a Mideast outsourcing arm for American courier companies like FedEx and Airborne Express. Together with a partner, he founded Aramex, which today has transport, trucking and warehousing services, alliances with more than 45 companies worldwide and, last year, $189 million in revenues.
In 1997, Aramex was the first Middle Eastern company to go public on the NASDAQ. Five years later it returned to its Arab roots, bought back by a United Arab Emirates-based private-equity firm. This spring, when the company went public again, on the Dubai Stock Exchange, the IPO was 88 times oversubscribed, raising roughly the equivalent of $12 billion. A big basketball fan (his favorite team, the North Carolina Tar Heels, are the current U.S. college champions), he's also made sure that Aramex became the first company in Jordan to sponsor a semipro team.
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In his 24 years in business, Ghandour, who laughingly calls himself "a preacher for entrepreneurship in the region," has witnessed a change in the Arab business climate. New private-equity funds are popping up around the region. Some, like Tunisia's first private-equity fund, Tuninvest, have produced net job-growth averages that are five times that of Tunisia's labor market. Where once Arabs tended to focus on hard assets like oil and real estate, a new generation of entrepreneurs is starting up knowledge-based businesses. Jordan and Lebanon have burgeoning software development and outsourcing industries; the gulf and Lebanon are producing innovative new-media companies, with Western-style management and drive. "The new wealth, that's just starting to show its face, depends on intangibles," he says, citing Samih Toukan, founder of the Arab online community Maktoob.com, as an example of a key knowledge-based player. The region's traditional family firms, increasingly run by a younger generation educated in the West, are going public and growing more meritocratic. Traditionally, "our organizations have reflected what our governments looked like," he says. "Very patriarchal. A big boss sits at the top, and no decisions can be taken without him."
Not Aramex. Ghandour has worked hard to foster the entrepreneurial spirit in his 3,800-odd employees, 600 of whom own stock in the company. That's a rare innovation in an Arab company, as is its lack of a central structure directing managers. In his recent book "The World Is Flat," Thomas Friedman celebrates Aramex's nimbleness, describing how Ghandour used Jordanian software talent to create a Web-based tracking and tracing system to replace the technology offered by its former partner, Airborne Express.
Bright sparks and drive aren't enough, however, to breed an entrepreneur-friendly environment. A study of 15 private-equity firms for the World Economic Forum's 2005 Arab Competitiveness Report found that "inadequate regulation and legal infrastructure" was the second biggest obstacle facing the sector. "The supremacy of law affects everything we do," says Ghandour. "We've taken a bet on the region, but if it wants to attract investment, it'll have to change." Top of the to-do list for the Aramex CEO? Enforcing laws on the books, leveling --the playing field between foreign and local investors, speeding up judicial rulings and training judges who specialize in commercial law. "If the region doesn't plug into innovation, entrepreneurship and creativity, we will miss the boat again," he says. Not only is Ghandour already on the boat. He'll make sure he'll get his basketball scores, even while he's setting sail.
LUBNA AL-OLAYAN
Like all Saudi women, Lubna al-Olayan may not be allowed to drive a car, but she has proved she can more than hold her own in the field of international business. As the CEO of Olayan Financing, she employs 9,000 people and runs more than 30 companies involved in financial services, real estate and manufacturing, often in partnership with major multinationals. She also doesn't make any secret of her desire to combat the ultra-conservatives in her country. When she came to deliver the keynote address to the Jeddah Economic Forum in January 2004, she appeared in front of her mixed audience without a hijab, or head veil that is compulsory for Arab women. "If we in Saudi Arabia want to progress, we have no choice but to embrace change," she declared. While this prompted a sharp rebuke from the country's top cleric, don't expect al-Olayan to apologize--or backtrack.
NAGUIB SAWIRIS
The kidnappings were a turning point for Naguib Sawiris, at least in the eyes of many Egyptians. Since the late 1990s, his fame had spread as the dynamic force behind Orascom's phenomenal growth as a telecommunications empire spreading from Cairo across Africa, the Middle East, South Asia, and now into Europe. But when six of his Egyptian employees were kidnapped in Iraq last September, at the same time that other hostages were being beheaded by terrorists there, it was his personal contact and concern for the victims' families that impressed his countrymen. When Sawiris won the hostages' release, many people saw him as a hero.
That shouldn't come as a surprise. For all its enormous growth over the last five years, and its stunning performance on the Cairo and Alexandria stock market, Orascom Holdings still has the character of a family business. It was founded more than 50 years ago by Onsi Sawiris, 74, from a respected Coptic Christian family with deep roots in Egyptian life and culture. The company was nationalized by the Nasser regime, restarted under Sadat's government, and its fortunes have soared since President Hosni Mubarak launched major economic reforms in the 1990s. Now its different sections are run by the sons: Naguib, the eldest, handles telecoms; Samih takes care of hotels and development, and Nassef, the youngest, runs the construction business.
Naguib is still at the top of his game, currently negotiating to acquire the Italian cell-phone company WIND in a $12.1 billion deal that's one of the biggest leveraged buyouts in recent history, and he's already well on the way to making Orascom the dominant force in African and Middle Eastern communications. Naguib Sawiris likes to say "politicians should leave Arab unity to businessmen." As the Orascom empire expands, that looks like an ever more plausible--and hopeful--proposition.
MAHA AL-GHUNAIM
An economic powerhouse, Maha al-Ghunaim is the founder, vice chair and managing director of Global Investment House, the Kuwait-based investment managers in charge of $3 billion in assets. A star in the Arab banking firmament since the early 1980s, she helped expand the company beyond Kuwait, opening a branch in Bahrain, and launching the Global Index for the Kuwait Stock Exchange, which offers Gulf-wide investment expertise. Having served on numerous bank and investment company boards, al-Ghunaim also heads the executive committee of Kuwait's Young Arab Leaders project, an initiative by the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.
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