Africa Top Success Ils font l'Afrique
460 000 baguettes daily! Laïd Benamor, boss of his group that bears his name, is really the king of Algerian bread. A very nice success for this managing director of 47 years old.
Benamor group is the Algerian leader of cereal processing. He realized a turnover of about 200 million. His factories are settled in Corso Tahtani (25 km in the east of Alger in the wilaya of Boumerdès. The group has a specialized canning factory for concentrated tomato production in many ways.
The group was founded by his father in 1984 and President of the interprofessional Committee for cereals. It counts today 2 000 employees and the turnover increased from 3 billion to 20 billion dinars within 10 years (from 27 million to more than 180 million euros)
It was historically implanted on the site of Guelma.
The Corso industrial site has stopped producing since many years. It was innovated in 2012 with new equipment in Algeria –especially ovens bought from a French small and medium-sized enterprise, Mecatherm at 10 million euros for two line productions of baguettes and one for special breads.
« This project will create about 800 employments during the coming two years », specified Laïd Benamor. “In Corso, we control the whole processing chain, from the raw materials till the processing, as we process our own flour.”
Today, Laïd Benamor has other projects: “We expect to create frankness in settling our own points of sale or in working with existing bakeries. The prices for special breads and Viennese buns are not limited. The baker can thus make more profit on the sale, for example, of sandwiches at high market value.”
According to the national association of bakers, 38 million Algerians make use 49 million baguettes daily compare to France with its 65 million inhabitants for almost the same consumption!
He recognized to have easily invested in Algeria: “In Paris, where I wanted to open a bar for couscous, administrative procedures were a real struggle. More than four months to have all the authorizations! I never waited so much in Algeria. We obtained a concession in M’Sila within one month and we immediately launched our production of carrots, apricots and garlic.”
Laïd Benamor is also proud of his relationships with agricultural world: “we changed our relationships with the farmers. It was customer relationships before but today, it is partnership relationships.”
Laïd Benamor enthusiastically speaks about his future projects: flour production.
The group has a worldwide reputation. It exports today “pastas and couscous to France, Belgium, the United Kingdom, Saudi Arabia and Dubai. We are going to double our capacities to answer the demand. To export, it is to prepare the future. We could still do better, because the Chinese are no more competitive« .
The perspectives are very promising: » the extraordinary success we meet on our national market is a real booster to conquer Europe where lives in particular, a large population very fond of our products. We are furthermore excited by a deep conviction that we have a real role to play on the European markets. Furthermore, our pastas are exported from now on to Italy (…). All the range Benamor – tomato, harissa, semolina, couscous and pastas – is intended to export. We work furthermore on new things specially designed for the export market.”
The conclusion is imperative: “yes, I am a happy businessman, and how would I not be it with a turnover which progresses from 20 % to 30 % a year?”
Who would like not to be in his shoes?
