ORPHANED and impoverished, Syrian Mohed Altrad — the Ernst & Young World Entrepreneur of The Year (WEOY) for 2015 — would have been a shepherd if he hadn’t persisted in getting a proper education. Bullied in school, the lowly Bedouin-born “shepherd boy” emerged top of his class and went on to win a scholarship that eventually yielded him a PhD in computer science.

Now a French citizen, Mohed — who survived on one meal a day when he moved to France from a desert in Syria 46 years ago without knowing a word of French — is the country winner for France and was picked for the WEOY award from among 65 country winners from 53 countries.

Forbes magazine calculates his net worth to be US$1 billion (RM3.71 billion), putting him at No 46 in France and 1,741 in the World Billionaires List for 2015.

An author of several books, Mohed, who is about 65 years old (he does not know his birth date), says he sleeps little and spends his nights writing. His autobiography, Badawi (which means Bedouin in Arabic), is part of the literature curriculum in the French education syllabus.

His day job, however, is CEO of Montpellier-based Altrad Group, one of the largest scaffolding and construction equipment manufacturers in Europe. Altrad employs nearly 7,000 people and has 110 subsidiaries worldwide. In 2014, the group’s turnover was about €900 million while pretax profits came to some €200 million. According to Mohed, it might grow to €250 million in 2016.

Altrad Group was born out of the rubble of a bankrupt scaffolding company that Mohed had bought with a partner 30 years ago. It cost him some €700,000 at the time, but a bankrupt company was all he could afford, he says. It was a risk as France was going through a construction crisis.

“With the little money I had saved as an employee before, I put it in the company and that was enough to make it go on,” he tells The Edge after he was presented with the WEOY 2015 award at a gala dinner at the Salle des Etoiles in Monte Carlo on June 6.

According to Mohed, Altrad Group has never lost money and has seen double-digit growth every year in the past three decades.

“At the start, I reduced its development instead of growing it. Turnover was about 10 million 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, seven million francs and so on, but you have to wait till things improve,” he explains.

His patience and ability to work from the ground up have much to do with his history. In his own words: “I used to live with very little and I could revert to that.”

Raised by his grandmother in Raqqa, a northern Syrian city that is now the capital of Islamic state or ISIS, school was deemed irrelevant for a shepherd boy. Mohed went nonetheless, spying on the classroom through a hole in the wall. He was soon allowed to sit in and proved to be an excellent student. When he earned a scholarship to France, he could only speak Arabic. The same determination that got him to school helped him to not only master French and English but also earn a PhD.

He worked for 15 years in the telecommunications industry before becoming an entrepreneur.

The Altrad Group isn’t his first successful venture. After leaving the telecommunications industry in the mid-1980s, Mohed started a company producing portable computers with a university friend. The computers weighed 27kg each.

The business did well, thanks to the programme they built for airport arrival and departure boards that featured information 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 wanted to.

What came next seems to be kismet.

Mohed stumbled on the bankrupt scaffolding company while on holiday with his wife near the village of Montpellier. “This company happened to be in the same village where my wife was born,” Mohed says with a smile. And the rest, as they say, is history.

Some 35% of Altrad Group’s turnover comes from France, followed by the UK and Germany.

Within the next five to 10 years, Mohed hopes to take Altrad Group to the US. “We have been concentrating on Europe where the locations are close [to each other] and that has made sense. But, of course, now we want to move into the US,” Mohed says.

Altrad Group will do this the same way it has always done — making strategic acquisitions.

In fact, Mohed adds that in Malaysia alone, five scaffolding companies are looking to sell their businesses to Altrad Group, but he declines to give names. “We get opportunities every day … We will look at all these offers,” he says.

Incidentally, the Ernst & Young WEOY award, which has been running since 2001, went to Malaysian-born Olivia Lum in 2011. Lum, an adopted child who also had an impoverished childhood in Kampar, Perak, was the country winner for Singapore.

She founded Hyflux Ltd, a water desalination company in 1989, with just S$20,000 in capital. Today, Hyflux has a global presence and the company has a market capitalisation of S$685 million on the Singapore Exchange.

This year, 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, the Middle East and Africa, and has a market capitalisation of over S$2.3 billion.

This article first appeared in The Edge Malaysia Weekly, on June 22 - 28, 2015.

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