ARG 1 Africa: The Largest Wholly Owned Ghanaian Company that Specializes in Elevator Engineering

Roni Gaby Mattouk, CEO of elevator engineering company ARG 1 Africa, discusses competition in Ghana.

“Unfortunately, even though we are Ghanaian, and we believe the client should appreciate that we have a competitive advantage, it is not seen that way. Only international clients see it that way, such as Barclays Bank, Standard Chartered Bank, CAL Bank, etc. Big banks and international hotel companies emphasize what brand you represent. Second is local content. For the formal sector we do have a competitive advantage because in reality we are the largest wholly owned Ghanaian company that specializes in the industry. In the informal sector, which is the very successful Ghanaian man who runs a one-man show, the culture does not allow him to be comfortable working with a Ghanaian company. This can be for a number of reasons; 1) maybe they have burnt their fingers too many times working with a Ghanaian company, 2) maybe they do not want a Ghanaian company to know how much money they have because if they are putting up a $20 million building, immediately they will be known as a successful businessman. The culture in Ghana for successful people has always been a hidden culture, and we all know why. What somehow started to evolve in this country was when other neighboring countries like Nigeria and foreigners who came in would expose their success, but Ghana is still of the culture that a successful man does not expose his success. That is why on the formal level we have a competitive advantage, but on the local level it is challenging sometimes to convince people that they can get the same service, the same product and the same privacy and confidentiality that they get from a foreign company”, says Roni Gaby Mattouk.

“As for competition, there are 25 lift companies. Some are suitcase companies, some are medium size, and some are large. We treat them all as competition. For us scientifically, we wish to believe there are only three competitors in Ghana. When the formal sector comes in, they only invite those three companies to tender because of various reasons. Maybe it is certifications, maybe a track record, maybe human capital. In reality, we do not believe we have competition because if you want to measure capacity, the second company after us probably has 12 employees. We have stocks of spare parts worth €250,000 and the second probably has €20,000, so how do you measure competition? In construction, you have Classes A, B and C and for certain tenders you need to fulfill a certain requirement before you can tender. In elevators there are no prerequisites. If there were prerequisites like there are in Europe or advanced economies, I doubt anybody in Ghana would qualify because one is that you need to have installed more than 500 elevators. It is like pilots. You are qualified to fly certain planes depending on how many hours you have flown. Or in hospitals when you want to do your medical degree you need to clock a certain number of hours under internship to qualify for a certain position. It is the same with engineering, it is all about how many hours you have clocked. We have clocked over 700 elevators and each one was around 88 hours, so you can easily calculate the number of hours”, he adds.

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