When EXECUTIVE selects a company to write about, it indicates that the business has achieved some level of success, regardless of whether it is raking in the profits or experiencing difficulties. Even a casual reader will recognize that companies we have covered are experiencing extremely tough times. Industrialists cannot produce competitively, traders are hobbled by indirect taxation, agricultural producers are in decline, and the government seems impotent in its attempts to provide the services and regulatory environment that the private sector needs to function effectively.
This issue contains another example. Lecico, a venerable Lebanese industry, is going great guns with its investments in Egypt. Netting around $10 million a year in profits over the last few years and exporting, it has nearly 8% of Britain’s sanitary ware market and can’t put a foot wrong. But the same operation in Lebanon is struggling to make a dime. It managed to break even last year but lost money in 1998, and production and exports have fallen. Lecico’s case demonstrates that even successful and well-managed companies can struggle to do well in this country.
That’s why our cover story makes such enjoyable reading. Known as Concord here, the company is part of a group that makes refrigerators in Lebanon, Syria and Saudi Arabia. Local production has increased by more than 1,000% since the war. By providing affordable products that don’t fall apart within months, Concord has shouldered aside big-time international competitors to take the largest chunk of the refrigerator market in Lebanon for a single company. In a land where the locals seem to prefer imports, not many domestic manufacturers can make that claim.
From real numbers to more intangible development plans, our stories on the nascent e-banking industry and entrepreneurial plans to make Lebanon a regional Silicon Valley report on how technology could transform the way the Lebanese do business and the nature of the economy itself. Both are ambitious and admirable in concept, but EXECUTIVE was inclined to adopt a “we’ll believe it when we see it” attitude. Past experience teaches that grand plans do not always bear equally impressive fruit in Lebanon. Still, if they do achieve even some of what they are proposing, we’ll be the first to cheer