عربي |
عربي |
My grandfather Mohammed Obeid Binzagr started the business. His father Obeid had married a local Jeddah girl from a family called Zamka. Following the death of her husband, she married a man named Mansour Harbi a sea captain, He owned a big ship that sailed out of Jeddah to Suez, Aden, Bahrain etc. Because Mohmmed’s father died when he was still very young, Mansour effectively became my grandfather’s guardian and would take him along on his seafaring trips.
After the death of his stepfather, Mohammed started his role as a merchant sea captain. We estimate that in about 1881, he stopped travelling and became a land–based merchant in Jeddah. He traded in the same kind of commodities as before, until his death in 1920. My grandfather had two sons, my father and my uncle. They were both minors when he died and the time of his death, the business was a private partnership.
Around the 1930s our business shifted from bulk commodities to manufactured products. We started importing cigarettes from the British American Tobacco Company, via their agent in Aden. We also imported starch from a Belgian company that was eventually acquired by CPC. They eventually became Best Foods and was finally bought out by Unilever, which makes Knorr and Mazola products.
At about the same time we started working with Unilever products like soap. It wasn’t branded soap like the Lux we get today. That was later in the second stage, where we imported and sold manufactured products from western companies and multinationals, as they later became known. To this day Unilever is our most valued Principle.
In the 1950s, my oldest brother, who has since passed away, joined the business. In those days we were working with Lever Brothers for soap, and the Dutch Margarine Union, for hard fats. Lever Brothers and the Dutch Margarine Union eventually merged and became Unilever. We’ve been working with Unilever for longer than Unilever has been a company In this third stage of the company, there were many changes, we began building factories and industrialized the manufacture of branded products locally.
In the mid 1970’s Binzagr Company comprised of Faisal my second brother, Mohammed my third brother, and I. We started manufacturing soap with Unilever in the early 1970s. Initially we made powdered laundry detergent and then Lux soap. Later we built a match factory in partnership with a German company. We also built a soft drinks factory with a Danish company, making what is now called Suntop and Sunquick.