Ahmed Abou Hashima (Wikimedia Commons)
CAIRO 19 July 2017: Egyptian businessman Ahmed Abou Hashima, CEO of Egyptian Steel, was featured on the July issue cover of Entrepreneur Middle East magazine as a role model worth following.
The article featuring Abou Hashima noted that although his enterprise was only started in 2010, during a critical time in Egypt just months before January Revolution in 2011, “we had to believe in our country, and that we will bounce back even stronger than we were,” Abou Hashima said.
According to the magazine, the growth rate of Egyptian Steel was “noteworthy” and Abou Hashima was on his way to “becoming one of the region’s most prominent businessmen.”
Abou Hashima highlighted that he and his partners shared a strategy; and it was to invest in Egypt, and despite the rough times, his partners decided not to stop their investments in the country.
And today, the company is not only standing but expanding. However, Abou Hashima stressed that one of the most important factors of his company’s success was the “recruitment of talent”, explaining that he can spend billions on steel, “but with an inefficient team, they’d waste all the investments.”
He later started executing his plans for corporate social responsibility projects, as a way of giving back to the country. In 2014, Abou Hashima noted that Egyptian Steel stopped any advertisements on TV, which are known to costs millions, and used the budget instead to renovate Egypt’s 20 most impoverished villages.
“In my book, the business world does not revolve around materialistic gains. It’s our duty to improve people’s lives and to lessen their suffering as much as we can,” said Abou Hashima.
However, Abou Hashima stressed that although the ads are back, funding social projects in Egypt is still ongoing. Advertisements were brought back only because they needed to announce their new big project in Beni Suef.
Abou Hashima won a number of prizes including the Responsible Leadership award at Entrepreneur Middle East Enterprise Agility Awards in Saudi Arabia in 2015.
Abou Hashima also owns Egyptian’s Media, which acquired 100 percent of ONTV channel, 51 percent of Presentation Sports for sports marketing and media, and 50 percent of Misr Cinema for movie and TV production. He is also a shareholder of Youm7, a parent company of Egypt Today.
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