Abderrahmane Benhamadi heard a Simon and Garfunkel song and named the company that became Algeria's largest private corporation after it

The name came from a song. In the early 2000s, Abderrahmane Benhamadi was building a factory on the outskirts of Bordj Bou Arreridj, a city on Algeria's High Plateaus, and needed something to call the brand he was about to launch. He had been listening to "El Condor Pasa," the Simon and Garfunkel track, and liked the sound of it. He told Jeune Afrique in 2016 that it was the song in his head at the time, so he went with it.

The company he named Condor is now Algeria's largest private corporation, with annual revenues exceeding $1 billion and a manufacturing footprint that spans electronics, household appliances, smartphones and solar panels across three continents.

The story behind that name starts a generation earlier. The Benhamadi Group traces its origins to 1954, when Mohamed Tahar Benhamadi, Abderrahmane's father, started a small commercial operation in Bordj Bou Arreridj, gradually expanding into transport with trucks hauling construction materials across northeastern Algeria. The family business stayed modest for decades, constrained by the socialist economic model Algeria adopted at independence in 1962 that left limited room for private enterprise. Abderrahmane himself has described that era as one in which the private sector was treated as a danger, not an opportunity.

The opportunity arrived when Algeria's economy began to open in the 1990s. Abderrahmane, one of seven sons of Mohamed Tahar, had studied in Sétif and later in England before returning to join the family business. He spotted a simple structural advantage in the import market: customs duties on finished electronic goods were significantly higher than on component parts. He began by importing satellite receivers, which sold quickly. He moved to televisions and household appliances. When the tariff differential made importing finished products increasingly expensive, he drew the logical conclusion.

He bought a 2,000-square-meter plot of land on the edge of Bordj Bou Arreridj and built a factory to assemble televisions from imported components. On February 9, 2002, Condor Electronics was officially incorporated. The approach was clear and repeatable: identify a high-volume imported product, bring in the components, assemble locally, sell at competitive prices. He applied it to televisions first, then computers and tablets from 2006, then smartphones, then solar panels.

By 2013, Condor's annual turnover had reached $500 million. By 2017, the group's revenue in household appliances alone had crossed 900 million euros. In 2024, the group reported annual revenue of more than $1 billion across its electronics and appliances operations, ranking it as Algeria's second-largest private company by turnover and placing it among the top 100 Arab family businesses according to Forbes Middle East.

Condor Electronics now employs approximately 4,200 people, operates 143 retail stores and sells products across Africa, Europe and the Middle East. It is Algeria's second-largest smartphone brand, trailing only Samsung, and holds market leadership in televisions, refrigerators and washing machines.

The pattern of expansion continues. In 2024, Condor launched a new smartphone production unit aimed at reaching nearly two million units annually, targeting the Middle East and North Africa electronics market. In February 2025, Benhamadi signed a deal in Cairo that represents the group's most ambitious single investment. Under the agreement with China's Hisense Group, Condor will build Africa's largest air conditioner manufacturing plant in Bordj Bou Arreridj at a cost of $200 million, with an annual production capacity of two million units. Approximately 80% of output will be exported, taking advantage of Algeria's free trade agreements and bilateral conventions that remove customs barriers and make Algerian-manufactured goods more cost-effective to export than equivalent Chinese-made products. Hisense has effectively chosen Algeria as its manufacturing hub for African and European market penetration.

The group has also made deliberate portfolio decisions. In January 2023, Condor sold its entire stake in Alver Spa, a glass packaging manufacturer it had grown into one of Algeria's leading hollow glass producers, to French beverage giant Castel Group. The sale was described as a strategic move to refocus the group on its core electronics and appliances operations.

The Benhamadi Group spans construction, hospitality and agri-food in addition to electronics. Abderrahmane leads it as chairman and founder. His net worth is not publicly disclosed, but the group's revenues and asset base place him among the wealthiest individuals in Algeria and the wider North African private sector.

He built it all from the same city his father started in, using a method simple enough to explain in one sentence: find what Algeria imports, figure out how to make it locally and repeat until the market is yours.