Pursue the right opportunities to drive success: Dr Abdul Majeed Alhokair

“While I like to think that we get it right every time, in reality that cannot always be the case. What’s important is that we always strive to get it right” – Dr Abdul Majeed Alhokair, Director of Saudi Arabia-based diversified business Fawaz Alhokair Group, which has rebranded to Cenomi.  

Retail in the Middle East is a lucrative business because visiting shopping malls is integral to the social landscape of the region. It’s also highly competitive. Families visit malls for recreation, socialising and shopping, the reigning paradigm being ‘retailtainment’, with parents browsing stores and socialising while their children spend time in the ‘edutainment’ components that malls routinely offer today.

Overall, retail is lucrative as discretionary spending makes this sector a strong economic performer in the region. The steady influx of best-in-class international brands has seen a sea change taking place in the retail scenario in the region as it shed its once-local flavour to offer brands from all corners of the globe housed in world-class malls. International retailers are increasingly targeting the Middle East even as their traditional western markets witness a continuing downtrend in the pervasive global economic crisis.

But any retailer worth his salt will tell you ‘retail is detail’, which means it’s all about concentrating on the details if retail is to be profitable. The greatest challenge facing our business is to understand the right opportunities to pursue and the ones to reject. That’s been a key learning in our journey in retail, which began in 1990 with a single menswear store in Saudi Arabia.

My brothers – Fawaz Alhokair and Salman Alhokair – and I were quick to realise the huge opportunity for international fashion brands in the Kingdom. We opened our first franchise store within two years of embarking on our momentous journey and it’s been a fulfilling experience. Over the past three decades, we have gone from that single menswear store to becoming one of the largest franchise retailers globally. Through our growth over the decades what’s heartening is the deep-rooted loyalty towards the Group, which is evident in the average work span of not just our senior team but our entire workforce.

The full story was published in the May 2014 edition of IMAGES RetailME and the excerpt is part of the September 2023 ‘Leadership Stories Collector’s Edition’.

Link to purchase a copy: https://www.imagesretailme.com/e-magazine/