Ramzi Cortas Chairman and general manager, Cortas
Cortas was founded in 1928 by current chairman and general manager Ramzi Cortas’ father, who was 15 years old during the famine in Lebanon in World War One.
“This was an incentive to start a food industry to support people and stop starvation during hard times, a principle that is still there,” said Cortas. The family-run firm is now one of the largest food manufacturers in Lebanon, and has introduced numerous products to the market, including orange marmalade during the Second World War — with expertise provided by the British government to cater to soldiers diets — and the first company to ever can hummus tahini. Employing 75 staff, Cortas produces millions of tins a year, and has revenues in the “tens of millions.”
“We’ve had a lot of attempts by the Turks and the Israelis to go after our market, especially in tahini and grilled eggplant,” said Cortas. The company is currently working on an ISO certification for tahini, and is adding new equipment due to the “digital invasion,” to become more computerized. “There is a lot of competition from Israelis on short shelf-life products in mainstream supermarkets, and they are chipping into our market, but we are working on that with polypropylene packs. It is more a distribution than technical challenge,” he said.
Rival preserved food firm Al Wadi Al Akhdar dominates the shelves in Lebanon, but outside the country Cortas has the upper hand, exporting 85 percent of its products, with the highest percentage to the United States and Canada. Cortas is planning to up domestic sales through a new marketing campaign as the company been “ignoring” the Lebanese market.
“In one supermarket chain in California we sell more jam than in the whole of Lebanon,” said Cortas.
Nizar Raad Managing director, Universal Metal Products
Established in 1971, UMP was the first company of its type in the Middle East to manufacture collapsible aluminum tubes.
“In our business today, we are a top quality producer in the Middle East and comparable to, if not better than Europe,” said Nizar Raad, managing director. Raad’s statement is no boast, with his clients being major multinational and big-brand firms. “International brand companies rely on quality and then price, not price and then quality,” he said.
An advantage for UMP over the five other major aluminum tube factories in the Levant is his native workforce, a relative anomaly in a region which uses foreign labor that typically stay for just three to four years.
“We don’t have a turnover. Our average employee will stay with the company for 20 years, sharing experience and expertise,” said Raad. “We’re relatively stable because we don’t depend on the Lebanese market.”
Expertise is essential for UMP to maintain competitiveness, with 85 percent of its products exported. Raw materials are also of a high quality, with the aluminum pellets used to make the tubes imported from Europe along with specialized paints. But with such import-export dependency, the July 2006 War badly impacted UMP, losing 25 percent of its clients. It was also a close call as to whether the factory might have suffered the same fate as other bombed out industries.
“A drone hovered over the factory and everyone panicked, but luckily [the Israelis] didn’t drop a bomb on us,” said Raad. “And in industry, overheads are sky high and we’ve over 100 employees, it’s not like retail, so we were affected financially by the conflict.”
A governmental loan has helped UMP weather the sustained losses and the company is making headway in regaining clients.
