7 Business Lessons From Egyptian Billionaire Mohamed Mansour
Riches to rags to riches. Egyptian investment billionaire Mohamed Mansour’s life story has the miraculous twists of fortune more typical of a Victorian novel.
At age 10, his older brother hit him with a car and nearly severed his leg. A surgeon ignored the advice of the head doctor and refused to amputate the limb; Mansour was bedridden for three years but slowly recovered enough to walk again.
Mansour was born into a wealthy aristocratic family. But when he was enrolled in college at North Carolina State University, Egypt’s President Gamal Abdel Nasser confiscated his family’s fortune and nationalized their cotton company leaving Mansour suddenly penniless. The 18-year-old moved out of his fraternity house and into a crowded off-campus residence, lived on only bread and eggs for half a year, and found a minimum wage job at a restaurant that enabled him to scrape his way through the rest of school.
At age 20, just after finishing his degree, Mansour was diagnosed with kidney cancer. Only a minority of people survived the disease at the time. But a quick removal of the organ and radiation therapy sent him into recovery, and he’s been cancer-free ever since.
His family managed to restart their cotton export business under a new president, then launched an affiliated automobile distributor, a nascent enterprise that the 28-year-old ran with his brothers after his father’s death in 1976, then took over in the ’80s. Mansour and his family grew the Cairo-based Mansour Group, which he chairs, into a multibillion dollar empire, winning lucrative contracts with General Motors (it’s now one of the world’s largest GM distributors) and the construction equipment manufacturer Caterpillar.
In 2009, Mansour put $20 million in pre-IPO Facebook at $18 per share. He won’t disclose when he sold the stock, except to say that it was a good investment. The next year, just after moving to the UK, where he still lives, he established his family’s private equity firm Man Capital. These days, that accounts for nearly a third of his $3.3 billion fortune, with his Caterpillar dealer Mantrac accounting for another quarter, and the rest in personal assets and other Mansour businesses including Mansour Automotive and ManFoods (a McDonald’s restaurant operator in Egypt). His two surviving brothers Youssef and Yasseen, who run parts of the conglomerate, are also billionaires, worth $1.3 billion and $1.2 billion apiece.