If anyone has had his fair share of trials and tribulations in life, it is Mohed Altrad, who was named Ernst & Young (EY) World Entrepreneur of the Year (WEOY) for 2015.
Mohed, the founder and chief executive officer of Montpellier-based Altrad Group, is the country winner for France and was picked from among the 65 country winners from 53 countries vying for the title.
While he is a French citizen, Mohed is a native Syrian, and was born to a Bedouin tribe 65 years ago.
He was raised in poverty by his grandmother after his mother died at the age of 13, soon after his birth. Mohed reveals that both he and his elder brother, who died young, were the result of rape.
But you would never guess at Mohed’s troubled beginnings, looking at his present success.
In 2014, Altrad Group — a leading construction equipment and scaffolding manufacturer in Europe — had a turnover touching €900 million.
Its profit before tax amounted to some €200 million, according to Mohed, and this might grow to €250 million (RM1.06 billion) in 2016.
Altrad Group was born out of the rubble of a bankrupt scaffolding company that Mohed bought with a partner 30 years ago.
It cost him some €700,000 to purchase at the time, but a bankrupt company was all he could afford, Mohed said.
He took the risk as France underwent a construction crisis and grew the company with his own money.
“With the little money I saved as an employee before, I put it in the company and that was enough to make it go on,” he told The Edge Financial Daily in an interview after he was announced the winner at the WEOY 2015 gala dinner at the Salle des Etoiles in Monte Carlo on June 6.
According to Mohed, Altrad Group has seen double-digit growth each year for the last 30 years and the group never lost money.
“At the start, I reduced its development instead of growing it. Turnover was about 10 million [French] francs at the time but I reduced it to five million francs because that was all I could finance. You can then grow from five million francs to six million francs and seven million francs and so on, but you have to wait till things improve,” he said.
This patience and ability to work from the ground up has much to do with Mohed’s history. In his own words, “I used to live with very little and I could revert to this.”
Mohed had a poor childhood, growing up with his grandmother outside Raqqa, a northern Syrian city. His grandmother forbade him from going to school as she envisioned him growing up to be a shepherd.
He still went nonetheless and spied on the classroom through a hole in the wall. He was soon allowed to sit in and proved to be an excellent student.
Mohed went on to study in Raqqa and earned a scholarship to France. He only spoke Arabic at the time, but this did nothing to hinder the entrepreneur.
In France, he mastered French and English and eventually earned a PhD in Computer Science. He then worked for 15 years in the telecommunications industry.
But Altrad Group isn’t his first successful venture.
After leaving the telecommunications industry in the mid-1980s, he started a company producing portable computers with a university friend. These computers weighed 27kg.
The business did well as it built a programme for airport arrival and departure boards in Arabic. However, Mohed soon sold the business because he felt that he did not have the funds to develop the company the way he would have liked to.
What came next seems to have been left in the hands of kismet.
Mohed stumbled on the bankrupt scaffolding company while on holiday with his wife near the village of Montpellier. He heard about the company from a neighbour.
“This company happened to be in the same village where my wife was born,” Mohed smiled. And the rest, as they said, is history.
In the next five to 10 years, Mohed hopes to take Altrad to the United States market.
“We have been concentrating on Europe where the locations are close [to each other] and that has made sense. But of course we now want to move into the United States,” Mohed said.
Altrad will do this the same way it has always done, by making strategic acquisitions.
In fact, Mohed said that in Malaysia alone he had received offers from five scaffolding companies looking to sell their businesses to Altrad. However, he declined to give names.
“We get opportunities every day. We will look into all these offers,” he said.
The group’s largest contributor is France which consistently makes up some 35% of the group’s turnover, followed by the United Kingdom and Germany. It has a presence in 100 nations worldwide.
Aside from being a billionaire businessman, Mohed, who sleeps little, spends his night-time writing novels.
His autobiography, Badawi which means Bedouin or a nomadic Arab of the desert, is taught in the French education syllabus as part of the literature curriculum.
The EY WEOY event has been running since 2001 and the number of participating countries has been growing steadily.
In the last 10 years, participation has more than doubled, totalling 53 countries this year compared with 19 in the inaugural year.
New entrants to the competition this year were Belarus, Croatia, Peru and Romania.
Malaysia was represented by Goh Peng Ooi, founder and group executive chairman of Silverlake Axis Ltd.
The Singapore-listed company provides banking software and systems to the Asia-Pacific region, the Middle East and Africa, and now has a market capitalisation of over S$2.3 billion (RM6.44 billion).
The last time a Malaysian was crowned on the global platform was in 2011. Olivia Lum was the country winner for Singapore that year, lauded for her Singapore-listed company Hyflux Ltd.
Lum was an adopted child and had an impoverished childhood in Kampar, Perak. She founded Hyflux, a water desalination company in 1989 with just S$20,000 capital.
Today, Hyflux has a global presence and the company has a market capitalisation of S$685 million on the Singapore Exchange.
This article first appeared in The Edge Financial Daily, on June 22, 2015.