That's a lot of scaffolding.
From Monocle Magazine:
From the desert to the boardroom, Franco-Syrian businessman Mohed Altrad has built a billion-dollar empire from scaffolding.
“There is nothing more banal than scaffolding,” says Mohed Altrad, a salt-and-pepper-haired 71-year-old who speaks with a gentle, almost hushed voice. “But we’ve made a world leader of it; it’s the biggest success story in France in the past 25 years.”
This may be too big a claim but it’s certainly true that, to create the Altrad Group, the entrepreneur, writer and rugby enthusiast has conjured a global industrial player out of almost nothing. It began in 1985 when he was extracting assets from a bankrupted scaffolding enterprise, Méfran. The 200-person company was floundering but the universal application of the product piqued his interest, so he bought it. Today, as founder and president of Altrad Group, he employs about 40,000 people across 100 countries, overseeing revenue of €3.4bn and profits of €201m last fiscal year through innumerable construction and energy projects.
Getting to this point has been largely due to the sheer force of his determination. He started by extending the company’s product portfolio, then shifted his focus from small construction companies to industrial sites (such as refineries, nuclear centres and airports) and eventually sought opportunities abroad and competitors to acquire. “The difficulty is not to do something but the step before: to dare to do it,” he says with conviction.
This willingness to take risks, to work his way up from the bottom, owes much to his own extraordinary personal story, which he detailed in his autobiographical novel Badawi (Bedouin) published in 2002 (it is now taught in some schools as literature). Altrad was born into a Bedouin tribe in the Syrian desert sometime in either the late 1940s or early 1950s; he doesn’t know when exactly but picked 1948 for bureaucracy’s sake. Effectively orphaned when his teenage mother died and his father abandoned him to his grandmother, he attended school covertly against the wishes of his family, eventually winning a Syrian government scholarship that meant he could study in France.
At about the age of 18 he arrived in Montpellier and threw himself into learning French from scratch while studying physics and mathematics. He went on to get a phd in computer science and jobbed for technology firms and an oil company in Abu Dhabi before Méfran landed in his lap. He has lived in France ever since. What has all this taught him when it comes to life and work? His answer is cryptic: “Sometimes you don’t see where you are going to put your feet.”...MORE
