MABANI Steel continues to post double-digit annual growth figures despite the global financial crisis and a steep decline in industrial construction within the Gulf countries.

The company’s shipments last year were 49,000 tonnes or 33 per cent over 2008. Shipments this year are projected to increase to 61,000 tonnes or 25 per cent above last year’s, says Muayyad Khudairi, president of the Ras Al Khaimah-based designer, manufacturer and erector of pre-engineered steel buildings (PEB) and hot-rolled structural steel (HRSS).
“We can proudly and confidently say that since April 2007, when we began production, we have risen from a start-up to become one of the largest PEB manufacturers in the GCC and the fastest-growing PEB manufacturer in history,” he claims.
Mabani Steel is the vision of Khudairi and Ken Krieger (vice-president), a team that has worked together in the GCC since 1975.
Khudairi, a civil engineering graduate from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), began his PEB career as a structural design engineer with a US-based PEB manufacturer that was later relocated to Kuwait, where he worked with Krieger for several years. They have continued to work together since then, having contributed to the success of three PEB manufacturers in the GCC countries, according to Khudairi, who points out that Mabani Steel is their first start-up and their fourth PEB venture.
Khudairi focuses on sales, marketing and engineering and Krieger on plant operations and quality control and the pair are constantly innovating and changing the PEB business model with major emphasis on customer satisfaction. In 2006, Faisal Ishaque joined Mabani Steel as chief financial officer and the third member of the executive management. Since then they have collectively driven Mabani’s success.
In its desire to comply totally with customer requirements, Mabani has created a dedicated estimating department from its first day of operations. “At PEB manufacturing facilities generally, estimating is part of the engineering department’s responsibility. While this was adequate in earlier days when requests for quotation (RFQs) were simple and straightforward, today, a sizeable percentage of our RFQs are in the form of lengthy tender specifications and drawings that require a lot of time to understand and extract the correct and complete structural steel requirements,” says Khudairi. “This is why we have an estimating department that is staffed with 14 highly-experienced structural engineers and four proposal draftsmen. Every quotation (proposal offer) we submit is accompanied with proposal drawings that reflect our understanding of the structural and architectural requirements of the project.”
In addition to complying with the physical requirements of a project, Mabani always advocates the use of the latest US codes applicable to the design of PEBs.
Sometimes, while negotiating on contracts, Mabani’s team is asked to justify its pricing against rival bids, but Khudairi points out that the company’s quotation always reflects its total compliance – without deviations or omissions – to the tender documents and industry codes. “We struggle every day to make our customers understand that the reason our price is higher is because we are fully compliant,” he says.
“Mabani’s goal is to become the most trusted PEB manufacturer in the Middle East and Africa by being the most scope- and code-compliant manufacturer in the PEB industry; by providing the best after-sales and site service and by supplying the highest product quality as measured against tender specifications. We pledge to exceed the expectations of our customers at every step of the order fulfillment process,” Khudairi states.
Mabani has established a sales presence in over 20 cities worldwide. These include Abu Dhabi, Dubai and Ras Al Khaimah (UAE); Riyadh, Jeddah and Al Khobar (Saudi Arabia); Kuwait; Bahrain; Qatar; and Oman in the GCC. Outside the Gulf region, Mabani is present in Baghdad, Basra and Erbil (Iraq); Karachi and Lahore (Pakistan); Ghana, Angola, Tanzania, Libya, Sudan and Ethiopia (Africa); in addition to Yemen and the Philippines.