Page 28 - bne_Magazine_May_2017_print

28 I Cover story bne May 2017
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IRAN
1
Asadollah Asgaroladi $9bn
Food, banking,
real estate, healthcare
Asgaroladi (80) built up his father’s pistachio business, Hasas, by buying and selling abroad, aided by exploiting Iran’s former dual exchange range system. Brother Habibollah Asgaroladi was economy minister in the 1990s Rafsanjani administration.
2
Hossein Sabet Baktash $3bn
Hotels, Persian carpets
Sabet (67) started by trading between Germany and Iran, and then by investing in hotel projects in the Canary Islands in the 1980s. In the 2000s, he was sold a plot of land on Iran’s resort island of Kish, where he built the most luxurious Iranian hotel, the Dariush Grand Hotel.
3
Hossein Hedayati $1.5bn
Steel, real estate
Hedayati (54) is dubbed the “Abramovich of Iran” for building up Steel Azin and moving on to ownership of Steel Azin FC and taking a stake in Persepolis FC.
4
Ali Ansari
$500mn
Banking, construction, retail
Ansari (56) founded one of the new generation of Iranian banks, Tat Bank, in the mid-2000s, and has since made diverse investments, including Iran’s largest shopping mall, Tat Mall, to open in 2018.
5
$120mn Online retail
Saeed and Hamid Mohammadi
The Mohammadi twins are the founders and joint CEOs of DigiKala.com, Iran’s leading e-commerce platform. The siblings first launched the site with $10,000 of their savings but they have now received at least three rounds of financing to grow their business.
Name Net worth Sector
Not everything has gone well. An attempt to enter the agricultural sector by producing wheat failed, but “it is part of the learning curve, without mistakes there is no progress”.
Politics? No, thanks
Khazaradze is not planning to migrate from business to politics any time soon – despite past offers. He maintains that “everyone should stick to what they can do best. Together with my partners I can make a difference for Georgia developing businesses, rather than being in parliament; it is not for me.”
His contribution to put Georgia on the large international map could instead be Anaklia, the $2.5bn deep-sea port on the Black Sea which an international consortium led by Khazaradze will start developing by the end of 2017.
“Anaklia will change dramatically the position and the weight of Georgia in the region. At the moment, we are bottle- necked as our port facilities cannot serve big vessels, yet we are the shortest route connecting Asia to Europe. The potential is enormous.”
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