For a long time, Egypt had a hard time exporting their produce to Europe due to quality issues. It takes hard work, investment and a lot of commitment to change the mindset of most of Egyptian growers. Oriental Weavers started as a company that specialized in weaving carpets, but Mohamed Khamis set himself the goal to make the agricultural arm of Orientals Group successful and most of all profitable.
Mohamed Khamis is the son of the founder of Oriental Weavers, one of the biggest machine made carpet manufacturer in the world. Most of his family grew up to join the family business and work in the ‘Oriental Weavers Carpets International’ which is the industrial arm of Orientals Group. This didn’t fulfill Mohamed’s need to leave a mark on the business: “With my entire family already working in the carpet manufacturing sector, I felt my effort would not have any impact. With or without me, the company would be fine either way. This is when I changed my direction to the Urban Development part of Orientals Group. Although my family didn’t like my decision at first, eventually they accepted my wish.” Orientals for Urban Development (OUD) is one of the group’s ‘field diversified’ companies, an Oriental Weavers sister company and all under the umbrella of Orientals Group, which has Real-Estate sector, Tourism Development sector and owns a great land space in Agricultural sector with an area of almost 8500 acres, that can do a foundation of a leading organization in this business.
“When I jumped into the Agriculture side of the business, I had no idea how it all worked. I had to make an effort to master the skills required to run a business like this. What I discovered most of all, was a lack of knowledge among the growers. We would invest a lot of money in farms, but after the end of the season we would hardly have any produce to show for it. And if we did have produce, we would not be able to send it to Europe as the quality was not good enough,” Khamis explains. “For the general mindset though, quality was not a key important issue. It was their firm belief cultivation does not require a major effort and European importers were simply out to get us. ‘They’ would find the most insignificant issues to not accept a big volume of Egyptian produce. I immediately rejected this view, why would Europeans deny most of Egyptian produce, but accept more oranges from other countries? I felt we needed to make changes in how we ran our farms.”
As Khamis had little experience in the field himself, he decided to visit Fruit Logistica in Berlin. The exhibition was a great opportunity to see how other companies profiled themselves, how they did business and learn from them. “When I asked other experts in Egypt about the quality issues with oranges, I would mostly get the response ‘It’s only citrus’. This meant I needed to find somebody to manage our farms. This person would have to take the quality of our produce as serious as I do. Eventually I found Marius Bouwman, a South African expert, and gave him carte blanche. I made sure everyone in the company knew that Marius would get full control and people had to run the farm as he saw fit. Whether they agreed with his approach or not, I promised my employees bonuses based on whether they followed Marius’ orders to the smallest detail. This was a great success, and after meeting Marius I was introduced to Hans Korsten, a man specialized in quality control with his company “Partner in Sourcing”. This was the start of a beautiful relationship, with whom we could really build and establish our brand Nature’s Delight.”
Egypt had a reputation for delivering oranges “caused by some exporters” that were not always up to par when it came to quality. Now that Khamis had put everything into place to be able to export class I oranges of great quality, it was time to market his product in the global market. “We did something drastic during Fruit Logistica to stand out. Anyone who would order their first container of Nature’s Delight oranges would get a 50% discount. Naturally the orders went crazy, some were just trying to maximize their profits by doing a single buy, others would become loyal clients. And suddenly we were exporting larger amounts. We had proven it could be done! And honestly, any grower or exporter can do it, as long as they invest and bring expertise to their fields and execute proper quality control, like Marius and Hans have done for us, all in good cooperation with a dedicated team assisting them. ‘High Standard Quality + Organized Export Operation = Optimum Equation’ Khamis points. He found a particular individual who can actually put SOP and monitor it in the packhouse, by taking the vision of foreigners and translate it into a simple SOP and steps that the locals and blue collars workers can easily understand and implement, resulting in minimizing, if not eliminating errors. Ahmed AlAttar is the Business Development and Operations manager for Nature’s Delight who is holding up this part. We are in a position where we tell clients that if they don’t like the quality they don’t have to pay us, as the quality is of a very high standard. Nature’s Delight is on its way to become the citrus brand of the world!”
For the future, Khamis has a couple of ideas on what needs to be done to get Egypt ahead of the curve: “The world is already taking notice of the progress that is going on in Egypt. But we need to take it even further. We need better education, like specific management schools with agriculture in mind. We also need a strong entity that oversees the needs of all Egyptian exporters. To combine knowledge and skill and become the best that we can be. It would be a lot better than the internal competition that Egypt is dealing with. I would like to combine competition and cooperation into ‘Co-ompetition’ and replace price wars with a true association to benefit all of Egypt. Teamwork and transparency is what will move us forward. As a company, as a country but also as human beings.” Khamis concludes.
For more information:
Mohamed Khamis
Orientals for Urban Development
Tel: +202 226 830 85/7
Email: mmkhamis@oud-egypt.com
www.oudegypt.com