Algerian billionaire Abderrahmane Benhamadi's Condor breaks into Mali with 37 containers

Condor is sending 37 containers and trucks of electronics and household appliances to six foreign markets, and one of them is new.

Mohamed Salah Daâs, the company's director general, announced the shipment on Thursday, Sept. 24 from Bordj Bou Arréridj, the city on Algeria's high plateaus where the group is based. The cargo is bound for Mali, Mauritania, Libya, Tunisia, Egypt and Jordan, and Condor has never sold into Mali before. Further consignments there start next week.

Getting goods to Bamako means going round rather than across. The Malian shipment will travel by sea through Mauritania, with the state line CNAN carrying the containers, instead of taking the trans-Saharan route south.

This is a wider spread than Condor's last push and a smaller volume. It sent 68 containers to Egypt, Libya and Tunisia in April under the same national drive to lift non-hydrocarbon exports. This one halves the cargo and doubles the destinations.

European weather is filling part of it. Daâs said orders rose after the heatwave that hit southern Europe over the summer, with purchasing centres asking for portable air conditioners in particular, and he pointed to Condor's work with a new partner distributing its products across southern Europe from Spain.

He framed the exercise as a test of what Algerian factories can now build. Condor is raising the proportion of its products made locally, he said, competing at home on price and quality while sending abroad goods able to stand against major international brands.

Mali matters for what sits behind it. Algeria's commerce ministry has designated the country an additional trade route for Algerian companies moving into Africa, which makes it a gateway to the Sahel.

Condor carries most of that trade on its own. Daâs has said the company accounts for half of Algeria's home appliance exports and 90% of those leaving Bordj Bou Arréridj, figures that cannot be independently verified.

Abderrahmane Benhamadi built the business on a 2,000 square metre plot at the edge of the city, assembling televisions from imported components, and incorporated Condor Electronics on Feb. 9, 2002. He named it after a Simon and Garfunkel song.

It grew into televisions, computers, smartphones, solar panels and appliances. Condor Electronics now employs about 4,200 people and runs 143 retail stores, and the wider Benhamadi group spans roughly 30 companies with about 17,000 staff and revenue estimated at between $1 billion and $1.5 billion a year, across construction, metallurgy, plastics, hospitality and agri-food.

The family has been in business in Bordj Bou Arréridj since 1954, when Abderrahmane's father Mohamed Tahar Benhamadi started a small trading operation that moved into hauling construction materials across the north-east.

All of it nearly stopped in 2019. Abderrahmane Benhamadi and two of his brothers were placed in pre-trial detention at El Harrach prison in Algiers that August, during the anti-corruption purge that followed Abdelaziz Bouteflika's fall, on accusations of corruption, money laundering and covertly financing political parties. Courts later sentenced the brothers to prison terms and fines, and Benhamadi has contested every charge against him.

The company shed 40% of its workforce in February 2020 and cut export volumes, at one point delivering 4,000 units to an Italian partner that had ordered 10,000. A fourth brother, Moussa Benhamadi, a former communications minister, died of Covid in detention in July 2020.

Algeria sells the world oil and gas and almost nothing else. Condor is the company the government keeps pointing at when it argues that does not have to stay true.