Almajdouie Group

About the Founder

Shaikh Ali Ibrahim Almajdouie was born in 1940 in the small southwestern Saudi Arabian town of Baljurashi, a local trade hub hosting a weekly market. His childhood was defined by his family’s struggle to overcome financial hardship.^[1] Shaikh Ali quit school at the age of 11 to dedicate himself to his family’s support. Accompanied by relatives, he moved between different cities where he held small jobs for three years.^[2] At the age of 13, he moved to the kingdom’s Eastern Province and secured a job at Aramco, the national oil company. Shaikh Ali settled in the Eastern Province and spent the next two years working at Aramco, where, because of his youth, he received mandatory training and English-language courses for six hours every day. At the age of 16, he started working as an employee at King Abdul Aziz Seaport. At the same time, he purchased a taxi and began moonlighting as a driver to save up money. ^[3]

Founding Story

In 1962, Shaikh Ali used the entirety of his savings to purchase his first truck — a five-ton Ford that he drove on a daily basis, transporting imported goods from the port to customers inland. The initiative proved successful and Shaikh Ali hired his first employees. Now focused entirely on his trucking business, he officially registered it in 1967. Slowly, Shaikh Ali’s business grew, and with it, his reputation as a reliable transportation partner.^[4]

Growth Phase

Thanks to the flourishing oil industry, Saudi Arabia experienced an economic upswing in the 1970s. Coupled with the increasing demands of the kingdom’s military, this led to a surge in the demand for land transportation. Shaikh Ali leveraged these developments to set his business on a course of exponential growth. In the mid-1970s, Almajdouie became Aramco’s official conveyor,^[5] making the national oil company his main customer. Over the following years, Shaikh Ali grew his fleet to a total of 35 trucks, with a commensurate expansion in the business’s employment rolls. While the company was enjoying a period of rapid growth through the early 1980s, Shaikh Ali began to diversify his operations. Significantly, among these new ventures, Almajdouie was selected to become Hyundai’s new distributor in Saudi Arabia’s Eastern Province, marking the beginning of the business’s involvement in the automotive field, which would later become a key industry for the group.^[6]

Today

Shaikh Ali Almajdouie had long been a firm believer in the value of young people — that their combination of creative energy and the desire to prove themselves was a virtue in business, and that knowledge should be thus be proactively transferred to the younger generations.^[7] Seeing this sort of potential in his sons, he encouraged them to join the family business upon completing their education. The succession to the next generation proved extremely beneficial to the growth of the Almajdouie Group, which had evolved from a small land transport provider to a diversified conglomerate involved in multiple industries, with each of Shaikh Ali’s sons eventually leading a business line. In 2009, the Almajdouies finalized an 80-page family constitution focused on the achievement of two central goals: to avoid the group becoming a mere safety net for future generations and to prevent conflicts from arising between family members, a common problem they had observed among many other family-owned and -operated businesses in the Gulf region.^[8]

Under the leadership and management of Almajdouie’s second and third generations, the group now encompasses multiple business lines across various industries including automotive, real estate, food, and steel manufacturing, while logistics remains its core enterprise. Today, the group has over 5,000 employees in Saudi Arabia and associate offices across the Middle East, Africa, Europe, North America, and the Far East. Of the founder’s nine children, five sons occupy executive roles and members of the third generation have recently begun to join the group.^[9]