The story
The Mansour Group started as a cotton business founded in 1952 by Loutfy Mansour, one of the first Egyptians to graduate from Cambridge. The business was nationalized by President Gamal Abdel Nasser in the 1960s, forcing Mansour to Sudan and eventually Switzerland, where he continued to work in the cotton business. His sons attended school in the United States while he was working. Eventually, when Egypt returned to a market economy under President Anwar Sadat and his Infitah policy in the early 1970s, Mansour and his sons were able to return.
At that time, General Motors was looking for Egyptian partners to help them expand, and were connected with the Mansour family. The family set up a GM dealership and obtained Egyptian sales rights in 1975. The company was called Al-Mansour Automotive. In 1984, GM opened its first factory in Egypt, and in 1985 the first GM vehicle was produced in the country. Al-Mansour Automotive gained rights to sell GM cars in Africa, and eventually became the largest GM dealership in the world.
In 1977, the Mansour Group secured rights to sell and distribute Caterpillar digging equipment in Egypt. The Mantrac subsidiary was formed to manage the Caterpillar business, and eventually secured Caterpillar rights to Sub-Saharan Africa, Russia and Iraq. As of 2015, Mantrac was the fifth largest Caterpillar dealer in the world.
In 1992, the Mansour Group created an autonomous company, Mansour Financial, formally the Al-Mansour Holding Company for Financial Investments (MHCFI) to manage a license agreement with Philip Morris International (PMI) to produce and distribute PMI’s brands in Egypt. The Al-Mansour International Distribution Company (AMIDC) was created underneath Mansour Financial to manage the tobacco business. When the Philip Morris partnership ended in 2014, AMIDC partnered with Imperial Brands, then called Imperial Tobacco.
Manfoods was created in 1994 to manage McDonald's franchises in Egypt.
In 2000, the company launched Metro Markets, the first Egyptian-owned supermarket chain.
The company launched its first discount store in 2006, called Kheir Zaman, which translates to "The Good Old Days".
In 2010, the Mansour Group founded Man Capital (aka Mancap), a private investment subsidiary. The family transferred its entire net worth to the new standalone entity incorporated in London.
Read the full text
In September 2022, the group was listed by Forbes in the Middle East's Top 100 Arab Family Businesses, ranking second.
Following an investigation by HM Revenue and Customs into Mansour Group subsidiary Unatrac in February 2023, the parent company agreed to a multimillion-pound tax settlement with the British government.
From Wikipedia’s article on Mansour Group, shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.4