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After 36 years, 74 brands and billions of dollars, retail tycoon Mohi-Din BinHendi tells Kat Slowe why he has only just started.
"My aim is to invade the world," announces Mohi-Din BinHendi, president of BinHendi Enterprises.
He quickly pauses and corrects himself. "That is invade the world in a business form," he laughs.
Some might say BinHendi has already invaded the world. One would certainly think so if they saw him grinning, surrounded by his entourage, in his all-white office at the company's new Jacob & Co store in Dubai Mall.
From furniture to fashion, food, cars and construction, you name it BinHendi has got his hand in it. Today the company has so many brands under its umbrella that even he has lost count. Amna, his daughter and CEO of the family firm, gently reminds him it's 74. "You see how dumb I am? I did not know that," he laughs, amused.
Only BinHendi would describe himself as dumb, for as he begins to narrate, it swiftly becomes evident his life story is more fairy tale than failure.
A UAE national, BinHendi grew up and studied in Dubai. He lived in the emirate until his late teens, before being sent by his mother to India for misbehaving.
"I went to India to boarding school for a year and a half because I was a bad kid here. Not obeying the rules, driving cars when I was underage, banging cars," he grins.
His mother also wanted him to learn English. But he hated it and never quite felt like he fit in.
"I didn't like the way I went to the boarding school, my food, my style of living - everything was different," he says.
"The language was different and I felt very out of place. That [English] was the language that every mother wanted their child to learn. Still is today. Oh my son!" he mocks in a girlish voice.
After enduring India BinHendi left to study Business Administration at college in America, before eagerly returning to Dubai to set up his own business.
"Since I was born I think I looked like a businessman. I looked like this," he says, drawing a fierce scowl.
Frustrated by the lack of shops Dubai offered in its early years and unable to buy good clothes anywhere, BinHendi raised enough capital to start his first enterprise, a Pierre Cardin boutique, in 1973.
This was at a time, he explains, when Dubai was still just a town, when not even a book shop existed.
"At that time I could see that Dubai had no store where people could really go and buy good clothes - hence success," BinHendi reminisces.
