TALK | MAJED Belhasa
Back in business
With news that one of its largest joint venture projects has restarted in Dubai and new work in Qatar, Belhasa International Company managing director, Majed Belhasa, tells Melanie Mingas about managing growth and breaking out beyond Dubai
T
he biggest lesson we learned was not to keep all the eggs in one basket,” reflects Majed Belhasa, managing director for Belhasa International Company, when explaining why the company is now looking for work beyond Dubai. Belhasa Engineering and Contracting Company (BECC) was established in 1977 as part of the wider Belhasa Holdings PJSC, and today has four construction companies: Belhasa Six Construct, a joint venture with the Belgian firm Six Construct known as Besix; Belhasa Projects, specialising in sports surfaces; Belhasa Engineering and Al Tatweer Contracting LLC. When the Besix venture began in 1986, the mission was to “redefine the skyline of Dubai” and the resulting projects have included everything from Emirates Towers hotel complex to Burj Khalifa. As the construction boom snowballed last decade, there was so much work in Dubai Belhasa didn’t even need to expand to Abu Dhabi and the construction operations within the entire group of companies generated “more than 50%” of its total worth.
20 | www.thebigprojectme.com
ABOVE: Majed Belhasa.
“Belhasa Projects has a lot of diversity so it survived the downturn without a problem, but Belhasa Engineering depends on large projects so if you’re operating in a single economy or sector, when that dies, you risk dying with it. “Now we are thinking of expanding these operations to other countries to diversify the
“Now we are thinking of expanding these operations to other countries to diversify the income from different sources and we don’t want to stop there” income from different sources and we don’t want to stop there. We want to expand further because also we have to look at regions, and not just countries. So we have to look at every possibility,” he continues. Following a US college education, which saw Majed studying civil engineering at Colorado