Even when he was at university, Abdul Hamid Al Sunaid was brimming with ideas. Today he's a major player in the mobile retail market. He tells Shalaka Paradkar he owes his success to his clever team of motivators: his teenage children.
The shemagh, the traditional red-and-white checkered Arab headdress worn in Saudi Arabia and some other Arab countries, is many things for the Saudi gentleman: a symbol of his heritage and culture, a style statement as well as an accessory.
Some 12 million are sold in the kingdom every year, with sales peaking during Ramadan, with prices starting at Dh75. Strangely enough, this quintessentially Arab accessory is mostly manufactured in China and England.
So how would you describe a man who decides to give something that has pretty much remained unchanged for a little over 2,000 years a designer touch - and succeeds in a spectacular fashion?
Brave, imaginative, a risk taker, a keen entrepreneur and a savvy marketer, Abdul Hamid Al Sunaid is all of these. A chance conversation at an iftar tent led him on his quest for a designer shemagh.
Branded with a haute couture tag and only subtly tweaked so as to not lose its traditional elegance, the shemagh hit the market at twice the price of all the others.
Like traditional headdresses, his shemagh were also produced in England but under licence from
Dunhill and Givenchy. His country loved it. Al Sunaid's company Shaheen Arabia, which owns the franchise for the Dunhill and Givenchy brands in Saudi Arabia, turned his vision into a profitable, multi-million dollar business.
But fashion has taken a backseat for now. Today it is i2, the company Al Sunaid created from scratch and grew into the region's largest mobile retailers, wholesalers and distributors, that occupies all his attention now.
Formerly known as Itsalat International, i2 currently employs 2,200 people in 22 markets and continues to expand and diversify.
An entrepreneur who started his first business while studying at King Saud University, Al Sunaid gauged the tremendous potential in the fast-growing telecommunications field.
In 1993, he started a mobile retail outlet named Itsalat International, armed with a vision of turning it from a Saudi-based company to a Saudi multinational. Today based in Dubai, he's achieved that goal.
Having absorbed much of his business wisdom at his father's knee, this 42-year-old father of four now listens to his children whom he considers his best friends and critics.
Perhaps because of these inputs from the younger Al Sunaids, i2 is wooing a younger demographic with divisions such as i2 cafe, i2 club, i2 TV, i2 magazine and i2 logistics.
"I find myself working harder to make them more proud of their father," says Al Sunaid with a quiet smile.
I
Any free time I get, I love to spend with my family. My wife, son Abdul Elah, 16, daughters, Sharifah, 15, Shahala, 11, and my young baby Rayana, who is 18 months old.
When my children were younger, this did not affect the hours I spent at work. Now they are older and the business is growing, so I spend less time with friends in the diwani (as the majlis is called in Saudi Arabia).
I bounce a lot of my ideas off my older daughters and son. They understand quite a bit about the business and the competition. They are free to criticise me, more so than others. As a father, I alternate between being strict and flexible. My children and I talk openly to each other without hiding anything.
I work at i2 as an employee, not as the founder or chairperson. Our growth, diversity and speed are built on the fact that we have a strong team. Although we are a big company, it still feels like a family.
There are so many things I want to change about myself. Let's put it this way: there are many mistakes I committed in the past, but perhaps if I had not made those mistakes I would not be where I am today.
On the whole, I am happy where I am now. And I am happy with the life I've led, including all the mistakes I made, the good and bad experiences.
I would like to focus more on charity work. We have done several activities with social organisations such as Unicef during Ramadan. In the future, I would like to focus more on mentoring entrepreneurs.
ME
Me and my Saudi childhood:
I was born in Al Khobar, Saudi Arabia in 1965 - the youngest in a family of eight brothers and seven sisters. When I was born, I was like a grandchild to my father - even younger than some of his grandchildren.
While growing up, I spent a lot of time with my father. I went with him every day to his office and after work I accompanied him when he went to visit his friends. That was a big influence in my life.
By watching my father I learned how to talk to people and deal with them. My father owned several businesses: cold storage, contracting, oil and distributing of packed juices, but his main business was real estate - his real estate investments allowed him to retire early, in 1975.
I wouldn't say my family was wealthy, because that depends on how you define wealth. But yes, we had a high standard of living even before the oil boom in Saudi Arabia. My father made most of his money in the 1950s and early 1960s.
By the time the region began to boom with the discovery of oil, he had retired. Our family lived in Dammam (in the Eastern Province). Our community was close-knit. We lived in a neighbourhood where everyone knew everybody else.
My cousins and I would go every day after school to play football or swim. I was in the national long-distance swimming team for four years. I started swimming at the age of 12 and quit the team at 16. We swam daily for about 7km, which went up to 12km during championships.
At school I didn't study too hard, but I was a good student; the kind who did his homework and was well liked by the teachers. I started out being an A student, completed high school with a B and university with a C. (Yes, sadly, my education curve is a downhill one!)
Today what I miss most about Saudi Arabia are my family and friends. I travel often to meet them. Dubai's beaches make up for the beaches of my childhood. I still go swimming and waterskiiing every day.
Me and starting young:
After high school, I decided to get a degree in mass communications from King Saud University in Riyadh.
Really, I have no idea why I decided to study mass communications. I was the youngest in the family and had four older cousins who were also studying the same subject in Riyadh.
So it seemed like a good idea to follow them. Going to Riyadh also meant that I gave up swimming, as there were no beaches there. But it was a good experience to move to another city, to live alone and be independent.
In my last two years at university I started an IT-related business of my own in partnership with my brother.
I studied in Riyadh during the week and on weekends, I would be back in Dammam to work on my business. Those were a gruelling couple of years.
My brother went to the US to complete his higher education, leaving me responsible for the business. So I had no choice but to work every weekend.
I made many big mistakes in that first venture, which ran from 1992 to 1994. The company started from scratch, flourished, then went downhill as we incurred many losses. There were cashflow problems.
The easiest way out for me would have been to declare bankruptcy and close it, but I resisted. I was stubborn in my determination to bring the company on track and make everybody happy: bankers, creditors and vendors - to win their trust back and learn during the process.
In 1993 I started my telecom business. By the following year, my IT company was profitable again, so I sold that business and decided to concentrate on telecom.
Me and entrepreneurial ventures:
At the same time, I also started other business ventures. I had a landscaping business and an environmental one, which sold weather stations, airport meteorology systems and the like, as well as an insulation business. We were exclusive suppliers for Saudi Aramco.
In 1996 I created the first designer Arab headdress, or shemagh as it is called in Saudi Arabia, by collaborating with Dunhill (the white headdress worn in the UAE is a guthra while the red one in Saudi Arabia is a shemagh). That move changed the Arab headdress market in the GCC.
I got the idea one evening in a Ramadan tent after iftar when I was sitting with my uncles. Ramadan is the big season for the Arab headdress because people buy them for Eid. We then started discussing new designs for the headdress.
My thoughts were that it would be difficult to enter this business if we intended to compete with what was existing on the market. But perhaps if we entered with a luxury brand, then we could be successful.
I followed up on that discussion and managed to get a licence from Dunhill in the UK (because most shemaghs are produced there).
We started production and now we supply Dunhill-branded shemaghs to the entire GCC. Our shemagh retails at 100 per cent more than the price of existing headdresses - it's a luxury product, after all.
For so many years the shemagh had a classic pattern. We started re-designing it, developed a line of designs and then added Givenchy to our line.
My company Shaheen Arabia, which produces these designer shemaghs, is still the market leader in this segment. I used to be the managing director of i2 and Shaheen Arabia, but I recently relinquished my post at Shaheen Arabia as i2 is growing and I need to focus all my time on it.
MYSELF
What do you feel about entrepreneurship
in the region?
The lack of entrepreneurial skills is a big issue confronting us today. It upsets me that there is so little creativity and such unwillingness to start building from an idea.
I worked with the Chamber of Commerce in Jeddah to create a programme to encourage Arab entrepreneurs. It's a lot to do with education and how to support local initiatives to make them bigger.
Even at i2, the easiest thing for me to do would have been to piggyback on the success of a known international brand. But that would not have helped me or my country's economy.
What does the future hold for i2 and mobile telephony in the region?
We are expanding into telecom services and plan to operate several Mobile Virtual Network Operator (MVNO) licences throughout the Middle East, starting with Jordan.
Jordan has the most liberalised market and it will begin by allowing MVNOs to operate alongside the three existing mobile providers: Orange, Zain and Umniah. We are also going to have our first fixed-line licence in Bahrain.
An MVNO is a company with no telecommunication infrastructure of its own, which buys airtime minutes in bulk from licensed operators and retails them under its own brand.
I want i2 to continue to be the market leader in the region and become a fully integrated service provider. The innovations in mobile telephony today are endless. In London for instance, to park your car, you can pay with your mobile. (You call a certain number and enter the code of a parking bay.)
You will soon see things like this in Dubai. Soon you will be able to surf through TV channels on your mobile and watch visuals of an extremely good quality. Communication, entertainment, payments: your mobile will do them all.
