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Condor, the appliance manufacturer owned by Algeria's Benhamadi family, has shipped the country's first locally made portable air conditioners to Europe and is holding orders for more than 250,000 additional units.
The first consignment went to Spain. Kamel Rezig, Algeria's minister of foreign trade and export promotion, launched the operation on Tuesday from Condor's logistics platform at Bordj Bou Arréridj, the industrial city on Algeria's High Plateaus where the group is based, accompanied by provincial governor Kamel Nouicer.
A second shipment of fixed split air conditioning systems went to Tunisia. Together the two operations filled 46 shipping containers.
Rezig said the European orders came from major purchasing centres and retail distributors, and had surged during the heatwaves across southern Europe this summer. The units met European standards on quality, safety and performance, which is what allowed the orders to be placed at all.
Two days rather than five weeks
The commercial argument rests on geography.
Air conditioning is a seasonal product. Demand spikes during heatwaves and collapses afterwards, which leaves European retailers guessing months in advance how much to order from Asian suppliers whose goods take more than five weeks to arrive by sea.
Shipping from Algeria to southern European ports takes about 48 hours. A distributor in Spain or Italy can therefore reorder in the middle of a heatwave rather than committing in February, which cuts both the cost of holding stock and the risk of ordering wrong.
That advantage has existed for as long as Algeria has faced Europe across the Mediterranean. What has changed is that an Algerian manufacturer can now produce units a European retailer will accept.
Built on a Chinese partnership
The capacity behind the orders traces to a deal signed eighteen months ago.
Condor agreed in February 2025 with China's Hisense to build what would be Africa's largest air conditioner plant at Bordj Bou Arréridj, at a cost of about $200 million and a capacity of two million units a year. Roughly 80% of the output was earmarked for export from the outset.
The company has followed the same model repeatedly. It began assembling televisions from imported components in 2002, launched a smartphone production unit in 2024 targeting close to two million handsets annually, and signed an agreement in Berlin last week with the German firm Maincor Rohrsysteme to manufacture industrial pipes at the same site. Each involves a foreign technical partner and local assembly behind Algeria's tariff wall.
Condor says it is now targeting more than 20 export markets across Africa, the Gulf and Europe.
A state strategy, and a family group
The shipment sits inside a government campaign. President Abdelmadjid Tebboune has made non-hydrocarbon exports a central economic objective for a country where oil and gas have historically supplied the overwhelming majority of foreign earnings, and where the state has set a target of $30 billion in non-oil exports.
Rezig framed the Spanish order as evidence that Algerian manufacturing has become competitive rather than merely protected. Officials supervised further export operations during the visit, involving refrigerators and freezers made by other Algerian companies for Tunisia, Libya and Mauritania, and inspected the rail freight infrastructure serving the industrial zones.
The Benhamadi Group traces to 1954, when Mohamed Tahar Benhamadi ran a trading and transport business out of Bordj Bou Arréridj. It now spans electronics, household appliances, construction materials, metallurgy, plastics and agribusiness, generated more than $1 billion in household appliance revenues in 2024, and was ranked among Forbes Middle East's top 100 Arab family businesses in 2020.
The group is privately held and publishes no consolidated accounts, so no independent valuation of the family's wealth exists.
Condor has not disclosed the value of the European orders, the price at which the units are being sold, or a delivery schedule for the 250,000 outstanding.
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