Mohed Altrad: The road from Damascus

1948 is the year Mohad Altrad settled on as the year of his birth, but the man himself admits that this is only a rough estimate, his actual birthdate lost in the sands of time, due to his turbulent early years on Earth.

The fruit of rape, spurned by his tribe-leader father, and raised by his maternal grandmother from an early age after his mother’s death, it was assumed that Mohed would become a lowly sheep herder, if he survived that long. According to his grandmother, school was for the lazy, and besides, the idea of engaging in any activity that tied one to a fixed location ran contrary to the lifestyle of a people who were nomadic by nature. Mohed Altrad had other ideas, though, and ran away from the tribe to a cousin’s in Raqqa.

Big break
At the time Raqqa, like much of Syria, was experiencing a period of stability and economic growth, and the national government was keen to build new relationships the West. One of the ways it did this was by offering scholarships to study abroad for promising young Syrians from disadvantaged backgrounds.

The young Altrad’s potential was spotted by a teacher who had helped him earn his high-school diploma, and his way was paid to attend university in Europe in the hope he’d return to his country one day armed with the knowledge and contacts to help build it a brighter future. 

In 1969, with just 200 francs to his name (about €250 in today’s money) and not a word of French, he arrived at the prestigious University of Montpellier to study maths and physics, graduating three years later. Realizing the opportunity he had been given, Altrad threw himself fully into life in Languedoc, working part time as a grape-picker and courting a local girl and fellow student he would go on to marry.

"In 1985 Mohed Altrad bought a failing scaffolding business from the south of France. Four decades on, it has morphed into a multinational with 60,000 employees and turnover in excess of $5 billion"   

Altrad’s academic career brought him to Paris in the mid-1970s and in 1980 he graduated with a PhD in computer science. Now a French citizen, and having acquired experience – and significant savings – as an engineer for various energy and technology firms in France and the Middle East, he set out to forge his reputation as an entrepreneur.

Success in business  
In 1985, in partnership with a business associate from his recent past in Abu Dhabi, Richard Alcock, Altrad took a punt on a failing scaffolding business from the south of France, Mefran, returning the company to profitability withing a year of acquiring it.

As the decade drew to a close the now rebranded Altrad opened subsidiaries in Spain and Italy and started to look beyond the scaffolding business for growth opportunities. However 1990 brought a recession that saw the Altrad group’s revenue drop by 25% in the space of six months. The founders went back to basics, repeating the strategy of acquiring distressed asserts that had worked so well first time around with Mefran.

By the new millennium Altrad’s growth meant that Mohed was no longer shopping in the bargain bin. German rival Plettac was acquired in 2003 and five years later, UK cement-mixing specialist Belle Group entered the fold at a cost of $26 million.

Between 2015 and 2017, the group grew threefold, with a trio of blockbuster purchases in the industrial goods and services sector: Holland’s Hertel, France’s Prezioso and the UK’s Cape plc. Today Mohed presides over a family of companies that employs 60,000.  

Rugby and writing
To go with his corporate empire, Altrad also established a sporting fiefdom in his adopted home city of Montpellier. In the Top 14, France has the most lucrative, and arguably best, rugby union league in the world, and in 2011, at the behest of the city’s mayor, Hélène Mandroux, Mohed became Montpellier Hérault Rugby’s majority shareholder, plowing over $30 million into the franchise over the next decade.

This investment paid off spectacularly in 2022 when Montpellier lifted the Top 14 title for the first time ever. In addition to the navy and sky blue of MHR, the flying bird logo has also graced the French national team kit and is currently to be found on the front of that most famous of rugby shirts, the New Zealand All Blacks jersey.

Sport is not Altrad’s only non-business interest – his other passion is the written word. In 1994 he published a heavily autobiographical novel, entitled Badawi. No one-hit-wonder, he followed his debut up with L’hypothese de Dieu in 2006 and La promesse d’Annah in 2012.