История успеха

Именно его проявил глава скромного египетского семейства Sawiris. История одного из крупнейших застройщиков Orascom Construction Industries (OCI) началась в 50-х годах, когда сын провинциального землевладельца, Onsi Sawiris, организовал свою первую строительную компанию в египетском городе Сохаг. Она оказалась столь успешной, что привлекла внимание социалистического правительства Гамаля Абделя Насера и в начале 60-х была национализирована государством – пишет Сиона Дженкинс (Siona Jenkins) из Financial Times.
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2009

Building success
By Siona Jenkins
Published: March 26 2009 12:59 | Last updated: March 26 2009 12:59
Background
Building a large, successful company from nothing usually takes a lifetime. To do it three times against overwhelming odds is a sign of extraordinary persistence. Yet the modest head of Egypt’s Sawiris family has done just that.
The son of a provincial landowner, Onsi Sawiris, 76, set up his first construction company in the Upper Egyptian town of Sohag in 1950, after a brief flirtation with farming. Contracts flowed in to build the roads and the irrigation works that were crucial to Egypt’s agricultural output before the completion of the Aswan Dam, and soon Sawiris’s company grew into one of the country’s largest contractors.
But the company’s success was also its downfall. Sawiris caught the eye of Gamal Abdel Nasser’s socialist government and his company was one of many taken over by the Egyptian state during a wave of nationalisations in the early 1960s.
Chafing at being a salaried employee in his own company, Sawiris left Egypt for Libya in 1966 and set up another successful contracting business. Once again, political events intervened: after the signing of the Camp David accords in 1976, relations between Egypt and Libya grew tense and, like many other Egyptians in Libya, Sawiris was forced to leave his business behind. He returned to Egypt and, for the third time, started a contracting company, this time with five employees. He named it Orascom Construction Industries (OCI).
Sawiris’s tenacity paid off. OCI partnered international companies working in Egypt during a construction boom that was fuelled by a mixture of aid-financed infrastructure projects and market liberalisation. The company prospered and by the early 1990s, OCI was one of Egypt’s largest private sector contractors. Sawiris’s three sons – Naguib, Samih and Nassef – were brought in to learn the family business.
Business
By shrewdly investing in newly privatised cement plants and expanding into other sectors, OCI grew quickly in the 1990s. As it diversified beyond its contracting roots, the company soon outgrew the Egyptian market.
Nassef, Onsi’s youngest son took over the helm in the mid-1990s and, initially under his father’s watchful eye, made international expansion a priority – hardly surprising given Onsi’s experience with the vagaries of Egyptian politics. By 2004, 60 per cent of the company’s revenues and profits came from outside Egypt. OCI had become a multinational construction and building materials conglomerate with investments around the world, and was widely seen as one of the most successful companies in any emerging market.
Contributing to its success was the decision to consolidate each of the company’s diverse sectors into an independent entity, each headed by one of the Sawiris brothers. Thus, OCI’s diversification into information technology and communications in the 1990s was consolidated in 1997 with the incorporation of Orascom Telecom Holdings (OTH), headed by Naguib, the eldest brother. He proved more than able to compete with the parent company, and the following year launched Mobinil, Egypt’s first GSM network.
Since then, Naguib’s confident investment in risky markets with low penetration and high demand – including Iraq, Congo and Zimbabwe – has made OTH one of the largest and fastest-growing telecommunications operators in the Middle East, Africa and Asia – and Naguib one of the worlds’ richest men.
What others say
“Of the 200 or so companies that I have dealt with in my time, I would say that OCI in particular is one of the best-managed operations I have ever come across worldwide” – Philip Khoury, head of research at EFG- Hermes
In spite of difficulties in 2002, which led OTH to sell off assets in some countries, Naguib’s appetite for risk continues; his latest acquisition is a mobile phone network in North Korea.
The second part of OCI to be sliced off in the late 1990s was the company’s hotel and real estate development business. Orascom Hotels and Development (OHD) was given to Samih, the middle brother. OHD has been particularly vulnerable to the region’s political turmoil. Its flagship resort town of el-Gouna on Egypt’s Red Sea coast has been a resounding success, but events such as the attacks of September 11 2001 and the Iraq war have affected tourist numbers, often dramatically.
Like his brothers, Samih has compensated by expanding out of Egypt. OHD has developments in seven countries including Oman, Jordan and Montenegro. But the jewel in the company’s crown is Samih’s planned resort in the Swiss mountain village of Andermatt. Fluent in German, Samih charmed local residents into voting for the project and was given a rare exemption from the Swiss ban on foreigners buying land.
He is set to double the size of the village, turning it into a luxury development with five hotels, several hundred villas and an Alpine golf course. He has even based his company in the nearby town of Altdorf.
Other activities
Philanthropy has become an important sideline for the Sawirises in recent years. In 2001, the family established the Sawiris Foundation for Social Development, a wide-ranging philanthropic organisation supporting projects in health, education and professional development, as well as micro-credit programmes.
Goya, Samih’s wife, has established a workshop that trains underprivileged women in embroidery and markets their work through Malaika, her luxury cotton company. OCI has also established the OCI Foundation to fund education for Egyptians to study in the US in “fields that will contribute to the economic prosperity of Egypt”.
Lifestyle
Though frequently described as Egypt’s Rockefellers, the Sawirises are unlikely billionaires – famously down-to-earth and unflashy. Onsi and Yousriyya, his wife, are notoriously media shy and Nassef also shuns the limelight.
Competition between the three sons is fierce but remains good natured. The entire family has apartments in the same Nileside building in central Cairo, though Samih now lives across the river.
In spite of their high-profile businesses and constant travel, the family remains close-knit – partly, say family friends, as a result of the Libya years when Yousriyya stayed in Egypt and the boys went abroad to study.

What they say
“I don’t interfere with my sons’ business decisions but if my opinion is sought out I will tell them what I think. They don’t always listen to what I have to say, though” – Onsi Sawiris
“Wherever I smell money, I go” – Naguib Sawiris
“Small is not beautiful. In our business you need size” – Samih Sawiris
What others say
“Of the 200 or so companies that I have dealt with in my time, I would say that OCI in particular is one of the best-managed operations I have ever come across worldwide” – Philip Khoury, head of research at EFG- Hermes

Siona Jenkins is senior editor in the FT’s special reports department