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Nate Berner is co-founder and managing partner of Deep Green Solar, a solar investment platform
Jazz Lounge Spa is rated an impressive ninth among the 451 Dubai hammams, spas and wellness centres listed on TripAdvisor. Boutique male grooming is just one facet of International Holding Company (IHC), one of the world’s biggest and most curious publicly owned companies.
IHC jumped tenfold by market value in just over two years. It’s of a similar size to PepsiCo, Pfizer and Toyota in spite of being little understood inside the UAE and largely unknown everywhere else. As the FT reported in January:
Three years ago, International Holding Company was a little known company that ran fish farms and food and real estate businesses. It employed just 40 people. Today, the Abu Dhabi-listed group’s market capitalisation of $240bn is more than double that of global giants Siemens and GE and it has a headcount of 150,000.
Bloomberg data shows IHC to be the 40th biggest company in the world. Score one for the “heroes and dreamers . . . restless believers.”
IHC is chaired by Tahnoun bin Zayed Al Nahyan, known as TbZ. He’s the 54-year-old brother of the UAE president Mohammed bin Zayed al-Nahyan.
HH Sheikh Tahnoon Bin Zayed with Jiu-Jitsu athlete Hamad Eissa Al Bulooshi at the WPJJC 2012 #uaejj #abudhabi #uae pic.twitter.com/1JdD7HMD
— UAEJJF (@uaejjf) April 25, 2012
TbZ has a portfolio career: he’s the UAE’s national security adviser, as well as chairing the state holding company, and its largest lender. Hobbies include submission fighting, which means he features prominently on the Abu Dhabi Combat Club website.
In the past two years, IHC has realised some of the most impressive multiples on invested capital ever seen. The company received more than 40 companies worth approximately $4.7bn for nil or nominal consideration. Most of these, as reported by the FT, have been contributed by related parties but third-parties have also been getting in on the action:
A frugal ethos extends to employee compensation. IHC paid its 21 senior managers a mere ~$5mm in aggregate through the first 9 months of 2022.
While much of IHC is involved in healthcare and shipping, its asset portfolio is nothing if not diversified. Of the several hundred subsidiaries included in its 2021 annual report (PDF) there are companies involved with landscaping, driver training, sheep farming, lumber, furniture, motorcycle repair, typing and photocopying, stockbroking, recycled plastics trading, henna pigmenting and “labour camp management”. There’s a tennis club, hotels in Syria and Chechnya, and numerous beauty parlours including Glam & Glow and the Groovy Ladies Beauty Center.
And career progression can be parabolic. Pace LinkedIn, a person can be managing a single location of the UAE Gold’s Gym franchise a mere 23 months before ascending to senior management:
IHC’s failure late last year to buy a Colombian food group Grupo Nutresa (now subject to an investigation by Colombia’s attorney-general) was a rare public mis-step. A commitment of around $400mm to the recently-pulled Adani fundraising round has also drawn unwanted attention, and the April 2022 investment of $2bn in three Adani companies may drag on results.
Also awkward is the WSJ’s reporting on TbZ’s monetary support for the Assad family, to say nothing of IHC’s ~$14bn in guarantees and funding commitments:
Fortunately, IHC knows a very friendly lender. And never bet against its ability to pull off more infinite MOIC deals to boost the numerator on the ROIC.
IHC did not respond to FTAV’s emailed requests for comment.
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