Al Ghurair Group (), also known as Saif Al Ghurair Group, is a

Dubai Dubai (Help:IPA/English, /duːˈbaɪ/ Help:Pronunciation respelling key, ''doo-BYE''; Modern Standard Arabic, Modern Standard Arabic: ; Emirati Arabic, Emirati Arabic: , Romanization of Arabic, romanized: Help:IPA/English, /diˈbej/) is the Lis ...

United Arab Emirates The United Arab Emirates (UAE), or simply the Emirates, is a country in West Asia, in the Middle East, at the eastern end of the Arabian Peninsula. It is a Federal monarchy, federal elective monarchy made up of Emirates of the United Arab E ...

–based business group founded by the Al Ghurair family. A diverse conglomerate, it has operations in the

Middle East The Middle East (term originally coined in English language) is a geopolitical region encompassing the Arabian Peninsula, the Levant, Turkey, Egypt, Iran, and Iraq. The term came into widespread usage by the United Kingdom and western Eur ...

North Africa North Africa (sometimes Northern Africa) is a region encompassing the northern portion of the African continent. There is no singularly accepted scope for the region. However, it is sometimes defined as stretching from the Atlantic shores of t ...

Europe Europe is a continent located entirely in the Northern Hemisphere and mostly in the Eastern Hemisphere. It is bordered by the Arctic Ocean to the north, the Atlantic Ocean to the west, the Mediterranean Sea to the south, and Asia to the east ...

and

North America North America is a continent in the Northern Hemisphere, Northern and Western Hemisphere, Western hemispheres. North America is bordered to the north by the Arctic Ocean, to the east by the Atlantic Ocean, to the southeast by South Ameri ...

. The grandsons of Al Ghurair Group founder Ahmad Al Ghurair run the group. Abdul Rahman Saif Al Ghurair is chairman and Majid Saif Al Ghurair is the

chief executive officer A chief executive officer (CEO), also known as a chief executive or managing director, is the top-ranking corporate officer charged with the management of an organization, usually a company or a nonprofit organization. CEOs find roles in variou ...

Overview

Divisions

The group has three main lines of business: manufacturing, real estate, and investments. The group's manufacturing businesses include petrochemicals, aluminium and steel, and packaging. Its petrochemical subsidiaries include Taghleef Industries and Adeka Al Ghurair Additives, a chemical additives manufacturer. Aluminium extrusion companies Gulf Extrusions and Taweelah Aluminium Extrusion Company (TALEX), and The Royal Engineering Fabrication Company (REFCO), an aluminium fabricator for automobile parts, represent the group's aluminium businesses. Gulf Extrusions is one of the largest extrusion plants in the Gulf region. The Al Ghurair Group's packaging businesses include Arabian Packaging, a corrugated packaging manufacturer, Arabian Flexible Packaging, and Arabian Can Industry, a manufacturer of multipurpose cans. The manufacturing division also includes Al Ghurair Iron & Steel, a cold rolling and galvanizing complex located in

Mussafah Muṣaffah () or Musaffah is an industrial district to the southwest of Abu Dhabi, the United Arab Emirates. Also known as ''Muṣaffah Aṣ-Ṣanāʿiyah'' (), it is one of the most important economic areas of the United Arab Emirates and has been ...

. CAFU a petrol delivery app which was launched in 2018 has seen growth in the market also. Al Ghurair Real Estate oversees the group's real estate portfolio. The group also operates shopping malls, including the BurJurman Centre and Reef Mall. The Group's financial investments include a major stake in

Mashreq Bank Mashreq () is one of the oldest banking institutions in the United Arab Emirates and the Middle East. Established in 1967 as the Bank of Oman Oman, the bank later rebranded as Mashreq and has since expanded its operations across multiple markets. ...

Key people

Majid Saif Al Ghurair is

of the Al Ghurair Group. He is the chairman of Drake & Scull International and the Middle East Council of Shopping Centers and a board member of Investcorp Bank BSC. He is also a member and Young Global Leader of the

World Economic Forum The World Economic Forum (WEF) is an international non-governmental organization, international advocacy non-governmental organization and think tank, based in Cologny, Canton of Geneva, Switzerland. It was founded on 24 January 1971 by German ...

. Majid Saif Al Ghurair graduated from Al Ain University with a bachelor's degree in

accounting Accounting, also known as accountancy, is the process of recording and processing information about economic entity, economic entities, such as businesses and corporations. Accounting measures the results of an organization's economic activit ...

. Abdul Rahman Saif Al Ghurair is the chairman of the Al Ghurair Group. He is the former chairman of the

Dubai Chamber of Commerce and Industry Dubai Chambers is a non-profit organisation that serves the needs of the business community in Dubai. Dubai Chambers’ key responsibilities include delivering value-added services to the business community, driving effective advocacy to enhance ...

Early history (1960–1989)

The history of the Al Ghurair Group traces back to the 1930s when Ahmad Al Ghurair and his son Saif were

pearl divers Pearl hunting, also known as pearl fishing or pearling, is the activity of recovering or attempting to recover pearls from wild molluscs, usually oysters or mussels, in the sea or freshwater. Pearl hunting was prevalent in India and Japan for tho ...

. In 1960, as the business was successful and growing, Ahmad Al Ghurair founded the Al Ghurair Group to oversee the family's business interests. Ahmad Al Ghurair later turned the management of the family's business interests to his five sons: Saif, Abdulla, Majid, Marwan, and Jomaa. Saif became the chairman of the Al Ghurair Group, a position he held until the 1990s. The Al Ghurair Group built the United Arab Emirates' first cement factory, flour mill, and sugar refinery. The group founded the Bank of Oman (later Mashreq Bank) in Dubai 1967. In 1969, the group bought minority owner

Ottoman Bank The Ottoman Bank (), known from 1863 to 1925 as the Imperial Ottoman Bank (, ) and correspondingly referred to by its French acronym BIO, was a bank that played a major role in the financial history of the Ottoman Empire. By the early 20th cent ...

out of its 15 percent share of the bank. The bank had assets of over by 1978. It had become the largest private bank in the United Arab Emirates by the 1980s. The bank changed its name to Mashreq Bank in 1994. The group founded Gulf Extrusions, an

aluminium Aluminium (or aluminum in North American English) is a chemical element; it has chemical symbol, symbol Al and atomic number 13. It has a density lower than that of other common metals, about one-third that of steel. Aluminium has ...

extrusion Extrusion is a process used to create objects of a fixed cross section (geometry), cross-sectional profile by pushing material through a Die (manufacturing), die of the desired cross-section. Its two main advantages over other manufacturing pro ...

plant, in 1976. The plant opened in 1979. The Al Ghurair Group opened the Gulf's first shopping mall, Al Ghurair Centre, in 1981. Arabian Packaging, a producer of corrugated packaging, was founded by the group in 1982.

Modern history (since 1990)

In the 1990s brothers Saif Ahmad and Abdulla Al Ghurair decided to split the Al Ghurair Group and create two complementary companies. Saif Al Ghurair retained the chairmanship of the Al Ghurair Group (now also known as Saif Al Ghurair Group). Al Ghurair Investment (also known as Abdulla Al Ghurair Group), was spun off from the Al Ghurair Group. Al Ghurair Investment, chaired by Abdulla Al Ghurair, focused on the family's finance, food, and construction businesses. The restructuring of the Al Ghurair Group was completed by 1994. The Al Ghurair Group opened the BurJuman Centre, a luxury shopping mall, in 1991. The BurJuman was the second shopping mall to open in Dubai. It was expanded in a renovation in 2004. The metro station located near BurJuman was renamed to BurJuman station in 2012. The Al Ghurair Group founded Dubai Poly Film, a manufacturer of

biaxially oriented polypropylene Polypropylene (PP), also known as polypropene, is a thermoplastic polymer used in a wide variety of applications. It is produced via chain-growth polymerization from the monomer propylene. Polypropylene belongs to the group of polyolefins and is ...

, in 1998. The Al Ghurair Group established Arabian Can Industry a year later in 1999. Arabian Can Industry originally made three-piece food cans and later expanded to manufacture a variety of cans for foods and both edible and industrial oils; neck-in-cans and cans with plastic handles; and can components such as lids. The Reef Mall, a shopping mall, opened in February 2005. The mall targeted middle income customers and is located in the

Deira Deira ( ; Old Welsh/ or ; or ) was an area of Post-Roman Britain, and a later Anglian kingdom. Etymology The name of the kingdom is of Brythonic origin, and is derived from the Proto-Celtic , meaning 'oak' ( in modern Welsh), in which case ...

area of Dubai. The construction project was paid for by the Al Ghurair Group without outside funding. Al Ghurair Iron & Steel began the construction of the United Arab Emirates' first steel

cold rolling In metalworking, rolling is a metal forming process in which metal stock is passed through one or more pairs of rolls to reduce the thickness, to make the thickness uniform, and/or to impart a desired mechanical property. The concept is simi ...

and

galvanization Galvanization ( also spelled galvanisation) is the process of applying a protective zinc coating to steel or iron, to prevent rusting. The most common method is hot-dip galvanizing, in which the parts are coated by submerging them in a bath of ...

complex in 2006. The

-based plant opened in July 2008. In 2006, Dubai Poly Film was merged with two other companies, AKPP and Technopack. The new company was renamed Taghleef Industries. It acquired Radici Films in 2008. Taghleef Industries also acquired United States–based Applied Extrusion Technologies in 2012. This acquisition gave the company its first North American manufacturing plant. In 2014, Taghleef Industries acquired Spanish manufacturer Derprosa Film. In May 2011, Gulf Extrusions entered into a joint venture with Abu Dhabi Basic Industries Corporation, a subsidiary of Senaat, to create Taweelah Aluminium Extrusion Company (TALEX). TALEX was the first industrial project to be launched in Kizad. Later that year,

Nippon Steel (previously known as Nippon Steel & Sumitomo Metal until 2019) is Japan's largest steelmaker, headquartered in Marunouchi, Chiyoda, Tokyo. The company has four business segments, which are steelmaking, engineering, chemicals, and systems solu ...

acquired a 20 percent interest in Al Ghurair Iron & Steel. The investment was used to expand Al Ghurair Iron & Steel's operations in the Middle East. Al Ghurair Petrochemicals also entered into a joint venture with Japanese plastic additive manufacturer Adeka Corporation in 2011. The joint venture was named Adeka Al Ghurair Additives. The Royal Engineering Fabrication Company (REFCO), a wholly owned subsidiary of the Al Ghurair Group that manufactures aluminium parts for automobiles, opened a new fabrication plant in

Jebel Ali Jebel Ali () is a port town south-west of Dubai. The Jebel Ali Port is located there. Al Maktoum International Airport has been constructed just outside the port area. Jebel Ali is connected to Dubai via the UAE Exchange (formerly Jebel Al ...

in 2013. REFCO uses aluminium from the group's Gulf Extrusions subsidiary.

External links

Official Website

Al Ghurair Investments

References

{{reflist, 33em Conglomerate companies of the United Arab Emirates Companies based in Dubai Conglomerate companies established in 1960 1960 establishments in the Trucial States