Exceptional

Profile: Altrad Group
Few billionaires can claim
to have experienced as
radical a change in fortunes
as Mohed Altrad. His
entrepreneurial instincts
helped him create a
scaffolding and building
equipment business with
a turnover of €1.8b (a
little over US$2b) that
employs 17,000 people in
170 countries.
Altrad’s beginnings were
unpromising, to say the
least. Born into a Syrian tribe of Bedouin nomads, he was
brought up in the margins of the community. After his
mother died when he was 4, his position became even
more desperate.
The grandmother who took him in believed shepherds
had no need of books and refused to allow him to attend
school. Eventually, though, the young Altrad realized that
education was a vital passport to a better life — he would
trudge for an hour through the desert to spy on what was
going on in the classroom through a hole in the wall. A
kindly teacher spotted him and allowed him to sit in on
lessons, but he still had no money for pencils and books.
It was only when his father gave him a bicycle that his
luck changed.
“It’s strange, because I hated my father and that was the
only kind thing he ever did for me,” Altrad recalls. “I was the
poorest guy in the class, with a djellabah [traditional Arab
robe] that was half destroyed and no shoes, but once I had
that bicycle, I hired it out to my classmates and collected
some pennies to buy pencils, books and so on. That was
my first business.”
A jar of sand
Today, Altrad lives in a grand mansion in the center of the
southern French city of Montpellier. The red pin he wears
proudly in his lapel symbolizes his membership in the
Légion d’Honneur, France’s highest honor, but he keeps
a small jar of desert sand as a reminder of his roots. The
circumstances of his birth mean he can’t be sure in which
year he was born — he has chosen 1948 — and his children
Mohed Altrad bought Montpellier’s
struggling rugby union club in 2011 in
response to an appeal from the Mayor.
He now attends every home game.
“Why did I buy the rugby
club? Because I thought
I had to give something
back to a country that
has been so good to me.”
picked a date out of a hat — 9 March — so he would have
a birthday to celebrate.
What we do know for certain is that he arrived in France
on a cold, wet day in November 1969 to study physics
and math at the University of Montpellier. This was after
earning a baccalaureate at the university in Raqqa, then
Syria’s sixth largest city, and winning a scholarship to study
abroad. He could understand less than 10% of what the
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