The winning formula

‘There is not much new under the sun,' a phrase that could have been coined for the Gulf region where the booming economies have attracted financial players from home and abroad to invest in almost every available niche. Yet opportunities can be found for those that know where to look for them and one such man is entrepreneur Mohammed Al Ghussein. The relatively young CEO of Al Ghussein Global Investments (AGI), the investment house he founded in 2003, has the knack of spotting a gap in the market and has made rapid progress since his return to the UAE.

"I graduated in the US in 2000 and came back to take over the family business," he explains. "I worked with my father for two years but I wanted to get into my own business ideas. There were a lot of concepts that I was familiar with in the States that I wanted to implement here in the region, especially in retail brands and the service industry."

Al Ghussein has no pre-determined plan to target any one field, instead he follows where the opportunities lead: "We look at projects here in Dubai, in the region and abroad. Our goal is to acquire various businesses, to buy majority stakes in them, manage them on a day-to-day basis, build them up for a couple of years and then put them up for sale."

The group's current portfolio is valued at in excess of US$100m and is spread across the education, industry, retail, services and hospitality sectors. The two key acquisitions that have put the group on the map are the rights to the master-franchise for Hamleys toy shops in the region (for which AGI faced stiff competition from much larger financial players), and the 10-year regional franchise for West Coast Customs, the car customisation group behind MTV's ‘Pimp My Ride' show. The group has also been eyeing acquisitions in Jordan, Egypt and The Netherlands and has been offered opportunities in the US, although Al Ghussein feels that the distance poses too much of an obstacle at present.

Prior to the establishment of AGI as the primary holding company, each operation was being run almost independently. At one point nine companies were on the books at the same time and the logistical strain of trying to run all of them simultaneously proved almost impossible according to Al Ghussein.

"Before AGI we were running the businesses from various locations, but we needed a strategy, something for the long-term," he says. "It was set up so that we could have one wing to oversee the whole strategic development, marketing and the IT infrastructure. Each of the companies had their own so we decided to consolidate it all and that's how AGI was born."

While each individual company retains its own marketing department Al Ghussein wants AGI to be marketed as a sole entity, planning ahead for the benefits that will bring the group further down the line: "We're thinking of the future, we may need partners. Honestly, there are some projects that are a bit larger in scale than we could take on, something that maybe we could not acquire a majority stake in and we would need someone to go in with. So the name has to be out there so that they can become familiar with it."

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