From this seemingly innocuous beginning, the brothers built one of the largest conglomerates in the UAE, comprising a diversified portfolio of businesses in such high growth areas as trading, automobiles and heavy equipment, travel, foreign exchange, financial services, property development, construction, building materials, infrastructure development, telecommunications, information technology services and recycling.

This success has been attributed to a large extent to its ability to forge longstanding alliances, joint ventures, dealerships and licence arrangements with leading worldwide organisations such as Michelin, Castrol, Suzuki, Renault, Nissan Diesel, Tata, NEC, Avaya and Alcatel Lucent to name a few.

Together with an employee base of 5,000, and counting, from 38 different countries the group fosters diversity and is poised for further growth. The group already has minority interests in two local banks, an insurance company and a daily newspaper. Its balance sheet also includes a significant number of international investments, and the family has also ventured into real estate through KM Holding and its subsidiary KM Properties.

To round out the investments with a socially responsible play, the group last year set up the Emirates Recycling plant, built at a cost of over $17m, which will convert the more than eight million tonnes of construction waste material generated in Dubai annually into usable road and construction base aggregate.