Mantrac
“Every accomplishment starts with the decision to try.”
John F. Kennedy
Enabling infrastructure development
Caterpillar is surely one of the most recognisable brands in the world. Its name, it is said, was first suggested in 1905 by a photographer, who was reminded of a crawling caterpillar as he shot a new tractor prototype. In 1910, the Holt Manufacturing Company officially trademarked the name “Caterpillar” for its line of tractors, later becoming Caterpillar Inc. in 1925.
By the time Mantrac began supplying machines by Caterpillar in 1977, the US firm had become the world’s largest manufacturer of equipment for the construction, energy and mining sectors.
This was the second great partnership that the Mansour family reached with a US giant in the 1970s, following the historic agreement two years earlier with General Motors that led to the establishment of Mansour Automotive.
With its core business key to large infrastructure projects, Caterpillar had seen the potential and wanted to enter the rapidly growing and liberalising Egyptian market. Egypt’s ambitious pipeline of new transport infrastructure, energy development, housebuilding projects and commercial real estate developments, would need thousands of bulldozers, excavators and generators, among other equipment. Illinois-based Caterpillar wanted to be the company that supplied them, and the Mansour Group wanted to be the local business that delivered them.
One of the first decisions, once the contract was agreed, was to give the new venture a name. ‘Mantrac’, a shortened form of the first letters of ‘Mansour’ and ‘tractor’, fitted the bill, and so began a long and lucrative partnership.
Over the following almost 50 years, it is no exaggeration to say that Mantrac equipment and know-how has helped to transform large parts of the developing world, a programme of infrastructure development that has helped to drive economic growth and lifted millions out of poverty.
Today, the company is present is more than 10 countries across the developing world – Djibouti, Egypt, Ethiopia, Ghana, Iraq, Kenya, Liberia, Nigeria, Sierra Leone, Tanzania and Uganda – with offshore offices in the UK and China. It is a global enterprise with roots that run deep in the soil of the Middle East.
The company began to expand internationally in 1997 when it acquired Unatrac, a pan-African dealer of Caterpillar machines then owned by Unilever. The successful integration of the Unatrac businesses has enabled Mantrac Group to continue to support the economic development of the African continent.
It has been estimated that Mantrac-supplied equipment in Egypt alone has enabled the construction of the equivalent of 22 major cities. Projects in Egypt have included the massive New Valley project, a system of canals in the south of the country carrying water from Lake Nasser to irrigate large tracts of the Western Desert. Another highlight was Mantrac’s support for the New Suez Canal project, which added a parallel canal, increasing the capacity of the overall Suez Canal system.
Some of Mantrac’s longest serving employees pay tribute to Sir Mohamed Mansour, the company’s Chairman
Other projects included helping to revive 1.5 million acres of Egyptian countryside, assisting in the development of Egypt’s high-speed electric rail and providing machinery to build Cairo’s monorail. In mining, Mantrac machines excavated gold at Sukari, Egypt’s first large-scale modern mine, and 238 million tons of black sand. There have been hundreds of kilometres of roads laid, gas and electric power projects and work on stadia when football’s African Cup of Nations was hosted by Egypt in 2019.
In Nigeria, Mantrac’s customers have included Dangote Industries, the country’s largest conglomerate, as well as the oil group Shell and telecoms provider Airtel. In Kenya, its machines were used to build power plants for the nationalised power-generating company and for Kenya Breweries. In Sierra Leone its equipment was used in work with Africell, the nation’s dominant telecoms company, and at the diamond mines of Koidu Holdings. In Liberia, Caterpillar equipment was sold to Sing Africa Plantation, the country’s biggest logging company. In Ghana, Mantrac is supporting gold-mining operations with sophisticated service facilities.
In terms of its operations, the transformation that Mantrac has undertaken over the last decade or so has been extraordinary. Under the leadership of Group CEO Loutfy Mansour and Chief Operating Officer Nigel Lewis, the company has overhauled its management system, creating a matrix organisation with centralised department heads to oversee functions such as sales, marketing and finance. As an example of its commitment to skills and career development, the company has trained more than 500 young people since setting up a programme with engineering students from technical universities and institutions in 2016. In 2019, it also inaugurated the $60m Mohamed Mansour Component Repair Centre, the only accredited repair facility in Africa and the Middle East.
The majority of the company’s income comes from outside of Egypt today, justifying the decision to expand across borders to pursue long-term value and growth.
By 2022, Mantrac’s area of operation covered 8.2 million sq.km of land with a total population of 709 million and a total GDP of $1.8 trillion, while the workforce had grown to more than 3,000, including more than 850 service engineers.
Despite the exponential growth that Mantrac has already achieved, its story is far from over and the company still has a great deal more to offer. With a recognised correlation between infrastructure investment and economic growth, the company, and the countries it serves, see continued success ahead.
Find our more at Mantrac Group.
Image credits: Mantrac; Getty Images