Elie N. Hani, CEO, Ahmadiah Contracting and Trading Company

Ahmadiah has been one of the oldest construction companies in the region, and I’ve been with the company since graduating from university.

Ahmadiah was established in 1954, which for Kuwait and that part of the world is quite old. It’s a family-owned business, founded through a partnership between a Lebanese entrepreneur from the Najjar family and the Al-Thuwaini family, who were traders and businessmen in Kuwait. The original founders have since passed away, and today the company is run by the second and third generation of the family.

There’s an interesting piece of history behind the company’s founding, which is documented on our website. The original articles of association were just a sheet of paper typed on a typewriter at the time, and the currency in Kuwait then was the Indian rupee. It was signed by representatives of the two founding families — Mr. Abdul Latif Al-Thuwaini on the Kuwaiti side and Mr. Najib Al-Najjar on the Lebanese side — with the late Sheikh Sabah Al-Ahmad serving as witness and arbitrator between the two families in case of dispute. At the time he was Kuwait’s Foreign Minister, a position he would go on to hold longer than anyone else, before later becoming Ruler of Kuwait. The company took its name from Ahmad Al-Jaber, the father of both Sheikh Sabah Al-Ahmad and our current ruler, Sheikh Mishal Al-Ahmad — the name “Ahmad” became “Ahmadiah.” We’ve been operating continuously since 1954, so 72 years now.

The values guiding the company today are a direct inheritance from that founding generation — Abdul Latif Al-Tuwaini, Abdel Mohsen Al-Tuwaini, and Najib Al-Najjar — and from Antoine “Tony” Najjar, who led Ahmadiah’s growth as CEO from the 1970s until 2021.

I was once told a story by my late cousin, who was CEO for a long period, about an American firm that came to Kuwait in the 1960s looking to partner with a local company. Ahmadiah was around 15 years old at the time, and they chose to partner with us. When someone later asked why, the answer wasn’t really about our capabilities — it was that when he saw partners who had stuck together for 15 years without any conflict, that said a lot about their values.

As partners today — the Kuwaiti and Lebanese families and their inheritors — we still hold the same values. That’s a big part of why we have so many repeat clients; we’re likely the company with the most repeat clients in the market. Kuwaiti merchants come to us to develop their investments and projects because they know these will be executed quickly, on time, and at a fair price, and because they trust the values of the company’s owners. I believe that’s a key differentiator for us, and one of the main reasons for our success.

During COVID, we were invited to a Zoom meeting with a group of French business executives, organized by the French Embassy. We showed them a single slide: the Kuwait skyline. Then the next slide showed that many of those towers were built by Ahmadiah — from Al Hamra Tower, at 414 meters, to the NBK headquarters at around 300 meters, working with major names like SOM, the firm behind the Burj Khalifa.

Over the last decade, we’ve built nearly every five-star hotel in Kuwait except the Four Seasons — the Grand Hyatt, the Waldorf Astoria, the JW Marriott, and others. We’ve built most of the major shopping centers too, including The Avenues Mall 360 and its associated Rafael Nadal Academy development, and the two hotels in Avenues Phase 4. Anyone visiting Kuwait’s landmarks is likely looking at a project built by Ahmadiah.

Clients are very demanding, and what we deliver — the quality and the honesty we bring to the work — is why they keep coming back. Our name is closely tied to Kuwait’s development: when Kuwait first allowed 100-meter towers, we were the first to build them; when the limit went much higher, we built the 414-meter tower. We’re actually considering writing a book on Ahmadiah’s history and its contribution to what Kuwait is today.

More recently, we’ve entered hyperscale data center construction in Kuwait through our affiliate, Terrascale DC, where we serve as the primary on-the-ground execution partner for these highly engineered, mission-critical facilities.

In Saudi Arabia, we launched operations just four years ago, and we’re already delivering more than a million square meters of built-up space concurrently across high-end developments.

In contracting, there’s a lot of variation in how different contractors approach the same project. Today, contractors are generally classified into tiers, and if you look at any large language model, such as Claude, and ask it to identify the top-tier contractors in a market like Saudi Arabia, you’ll typically only get five or six names. Everyone else falls into a different tier, and the price gaps between tier-one and other contractors can be enormous.

That’s not because tier-one firms are making outsized margins — our financials are open to scrutiny, and even the top tier barely makes single-digit profit margins, often at the lower end given market competition and rate fluctuations. When a tier-two or tier-three contractor comes in 25–30% below that, it usually means the project will never be delivered the way it was intended. The difference has to be paid somewhere, and if the client holds firm, it’s the contractor who ends up losing money, often financed through the bank.

There’s an interesting comparison to the US, where a system called “surety” exists. Instead of a contractor providing a bank guarantee worth 10% of the contract value, they provide an insurance-backed guarantee. If they underperform, the insurer will bring in another contractor to finish the work properly, whatever the cost, even double the original price, and that contractor then becomes uninsurable going forward. That quickly filters out non-performing contractors, and the client is guaranteed the project gets delivered properly, rather than just being compensated with 10% if it fails.

In our region, that segregation between reliable and unreliable contractors doesn’t really exist yet, partly because the banking sector is closely tied into these relationships, which lets underperforming contractors stick around longer than they should. It doesn’t affect us as much, though, because we focus on complex, challenging projects that require real technical know-how, competing with major international contractors like Samsung and Hyundai, rather than the more standardized end of the market, like typical four- or ten-story buildings. That’s part of why, as I mentioned, none of the European contractors were able to win a single package on the Kuwait University project.

We work a lot with the private sector — as I mentioned, we have repeat clients who are real estate developers building shopping malls, hospitals, hotels, and similar projects. Some of them bring us in very early and don’t talk to anyone else. The advantage for them is that, rather than getting a finished design and pricing it only to find it isn’t optimized, our repeat clients bring us in before the design is finalized. We work closely with the designer to optimize the structure, services, and façades, make the system more efficient to build, and introduce value-engineering options, which ultimately makes the project faster and cheaper. That kind of close, early collaboration is a major part of how we support large real estate developments. Engineering complexity is best solved collaboratively and ahead of time.

We also win work through competitive bidding, in sectors like oil and gas earthworks and military bases, competing against firms of similar caliber. We’re very competitive there too. Beyond our core building division, we have sister companies covering geotechnical work and facility management, both of which grew organically out of our operations, and we’re partners with Hitachi on high-speed elevators for large towers.

Looking ahead, some of our growth is coming from broader regional trends, things like oil pipeline work tied to geopolitical developments in the region, and data centers, which are a major growth area globally. We’re currently building a data center for Google in Kuwait, and we’ve added two data center projects to our pipeline, since Kuwait and the wider region still has a lot of catching up to do in that space.

Looking further ahead, we’re institutionalizing these values into the technologies shaping construction’s next era — investing in digital project delivery through BIM, smart-building automation, AI adoption and integration, sustainability-driven design, and integrated facility management. Today our operations extend well beyond traditional civil contracting into specialized geotechnical works, infrastructure and road works, elevators, oil and gas, and high-end interior fit-outs.

When you put the interest of your client first, that is where you build an unbreakable relationship. Our people, whenever they are working on a project, are looking at it through the client’s eyes — not just Ahmadiah’s. The project becomes the “cherished son” — an Arabic expression for something entrusted to your care and treated with unconditional devotion — and whatever serves its interest best is fully adhered to. We do what’s best for the project. Clients running multi-million-dollar businesses and real estate projects are sophisticated, and they recognize and appreciate that contribution, that’s how trust gets built.

As I mentioned, it only takes one wrong move to lose that trust, and ours has been built over generations — we’ve worked with some clients continuously since 1974. A mistake like that would only happen if the underlying values weren’t strong enough, and the core values of our shareholders and owners haven’t changed since Ahmadiah was founded. We work with people who want to deliver on what we’ve committed to, and we always try to resolve issues properly.

Values are key to long-term success in any business, some people achieve short-term success, but that’s different. Human capital is extremely important too. Our real strength isn’t financial; it’s the loyalty of the people who work with us and who share the same values we hold. Investing in our people, and making sure they carry those same values into how they interact with clients, is a major key to our success.

We recently lost our chairman, who was the last surviving founder, two weeks ago. I would like to pay tribute here to Mr. Ahmad Al-Thuwaini— he was the last of the surviving founders, and he was truly a father figure to all of us. 

One of the more striking technical challenges we’ve tackled was building the National Bank of Kuwait headquarters, designed by Sir Norman Foster, a building with no roof, ending in a spike. We had 80- to 90-ton cranes suspended in the air on temporary supports, 300 metres above street level, in order to close up the building. We have a drone photograph that captures just how demanding that was, and how we worked through it.

When we built Al Hamra Tower, widely regarded as the tallest sculpted concrete tower in the world, Discovery Channel featured it in a 45-minute episode of Build It Bigger, focused entirely on the engineering challenges involved. I take real pride in the fact that Ahmadiah, as a local Kuwaiti contractor, was featured on that kind of international platform for one of the most technically demanding projects Discovery Channel considered. At the end of the day, all of us at Ahmadiah take pride in the difficulties we’ve faced and how we worked through them, that’s a big part of the satisfaction we get from this work.