Joseph Daher may only have become CEO of Almabani General Contractors in January, but he has spent more than 35 years working his way up the ranks of the Jeddah-based contracting giant.
The past 12 months have been huge for Almabani – largely due to its consortium with Bechtel, CCC and Siemens picking up the biggest Riyadh Metro contract – the $10.1bn contract for lines one and two.
Ground was broken on the project in April, and the consortium recently secured 11,000 visas for recruiting workers – it hopes to achieve a “similar number” next year.
As a result of the win, Daher expects Almabani’s own workforce numbers to shoot up from 8,000 when the contract was announced in July 2013 to nearer 18,000 by the end of this year.
The company, which is currently working on the airside infrastructure at Jeddah International Airport and on a sports complex at King Abdulaziz University in the same city, is also gearing up to land another of the big metro projects currently in development in the Kingdom.
Almabani is forecasting $1bn turnover in 2014 and Daher is confident it will be able to double that within five years.
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