Steps towards sustainability

Kuwait

Mubarak Naser Al Sayer, executive director of Al Sayer Group, talks to The Energy Year about the company’s pursuit of business diversification and its contribution to the energy transition within Kuwait. Al Sayer Group is a Kuwaiti company with a diverse portfolio of businesses, products and services.

How has Al Sayer Holding’s business strategy evolved over the years?
Al Sayer Holding is a diversified Group heavily involved in three sectors: automotive, real estate and investment. In addition, we participate significantly in the education and medical segments. The Group’s philosophy is to always seize the best opportunities that arise in the market to maximise our shareholders’ value while increasing family wealth and the welfare of our employees. To this end, Al-Sayer Holding has always sought to adapt to changes in the industry and, in so doing, maintain the growth and profitability of the business.
The 1990-1991 Iraqi invasion of Kuwait was a turning point for the group. We were hit hard and lost all our assets. The need to restart the business from scratch made us stronger. We equipped ourselves with a clear, forward-looking vision. While before the war the bulk of our investment was in Kuwait, it became evident that, for our business to thrive, more diversification and geographical expansion were required.
We began to look for business opportunities around the world while adhering to a few self-imposed guidelines. We would never invest in countries with fragile financial conditions, hostile tax systems or political instability. Investments in alcohol, military and activities detrimental to human development were also excluded

What is Al Sayer Group’s contribution to the energy transition in Kuwait?
Kuwait still heavily relies on oil for electricity generation, burning nearly 25% of its daily oil production for this purpose. That has a high impact on our health. Al Sayer Group is committed to changing this reality by acting toward optimising and diversifying its energy consumption, increasing solar power generation, minimising water use by focusing on wastewater and recycling waste in company buildings.
Our ultimate goal is to become a regional leader in sustainable energy. As a first step, we decided to convert our buildings into green ones by adopting the Gulf Organisation for Research & Development (GORD) Global Sustainability Assessment System (GSAS) Green building certification. Today, we have certified four of our facilities as green. Through a 20-year plan, we have set a target to save a certain amount of electricity in each building. We are already generating around 1.8 GWh annually of renewable energy through PV panels installed at our locations, having produced a total of 7.6 GWh since 2015.
We are close to signing a contract with our French partner ENGIE – we expect to sign it by the end of the year – to further optimise our energy usage, and we are confident this will bring us to achieve a 50% rate of energy savings in our mega car-delivery centre through energy conservation measures and PV installations. In such a way, we will improve our GSAS rating from Platinum to Diamond.
We are also working to adopt decarbonisation, net-zero and carbon credit solutions in collaboration with some of our partners in Qatar and Dubai, including GORD.

What is the Group’s penetration strategy for its sustainable products offering in Kuwait?
Al Sayer is consistently looking for innovative and technological solutions enabling the Group to market sustainable products and services to customers. For example, the Group actively markets hybrid vehicles, water-based paints, eco batteries and synthetic lubricants.
A major challenge in this sense is the need for government legislation for such products. European, American, Chinese and Japanese markets are more mature in this regard. Legislation is a crucial factor. Only when the proper legislation and incentives are in place will international manufacturers find it convenient and profitable to tap into the Kuwait market with their sustainable products. Nevertheless, the Kuwait government is taking some positive steps in this direction, heading toward cleaner petrol and installing electric car stations. We are confident that a lot will happen 10 years from now.
For our part, we aim to educate the market and ensure a 10% increase in sustainable product lines by 2025. For example, we are educating customers on the importance and benefits of replacing mineral oil with semisynthetic ones for their cars. While the former needs to be replaced every 3,000 kilometres [1,864 miles], the latter has a shelf life of 10,000-15,000 kilometres [6,214-9,321 miles], resulting in both cost and waste savings.
Another issue we will face in the future pertains to car batteries. The extraction of related raw materials and the disposal of batteries is likely to cause a lot of pollution. For this reason, we are working with our partners to develop hydrogen as a power solution for electric cars. However, Kuwait does not yet have hydrogen production.

What is your vision for the future of the Group?
We will continue to pursue our diversification strategy, looking at businesses that benefit the company and the community at large. We want to diversify towards IT and facilitate the country’s digital transformation. A key focus will be to invest heavily in the best engineering and technology in our facilities, as well as educate and train our employees to the highest standards.

How has Al Sayer been pursuing its business diversification?
Whenever we seek to expand our business, our prerogatives are the ability to generate revenues and wealth while participating in the social development of the targeted market’s society. In a nutshell, our driver is sustainable growth. With this mindset, we decided to expand into the educational sector.
We did this in Kuwait and are currently doing the same in Saudi Arabia and Oman. For the same reason, we have diversified into the medical industry with investments in Kuwait and the UAE. Such a sector is closely related to the energy industry and, more specifically, to the degree of environmental pollution and harm to human health caused by electricity generation.

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