Saudi-based Abunayyan Trading has officially opened the Abunayyan JCB headquarters in Riyadh on Sunday, in a glittering reception and presentation attended by top members of the Abunayyan Group, JCB from the UK, the Riyadh Chamber of Commerce and representatives from the British government.

The multi-national JCB (JC Bamford Excavators) is the world’s third largest construction equipment manufacturer producing more than 300 machine types - famous for its backhoe diggers, excavators, tractors and diesel engines.

As well as the inauguration ceremony, the dignitaries were taken on a tour of the extensive workshops, technical areas, and showrooms located on Khurais Road. The facility is claimed to feature the biggest JCB showroom in the world.

Khalid A Abunayyan, president and chief executive officer of Abunayyan Holding, delivered a keynote speech emphasising the strategic business relations being forged between the two companies.

“Abunayyan and the Bamfords share strong family and corporate values of reliability, innovation, customer-centricity, honesty and commitment,” remarked Abunayyan.

“It is imperative that we enrich our strategic partnership, maintain the momentum of high levels of business excellence, enhance mutual trust and expand strategic common ground. The power of our shared values is extended most importantly to our valued customers as well as to our business and people,” he noted.

Lord Anthony Bamford, the chairman of the board of JCB, was in attendance with his team including his son, George Bamford, director, and Graeme McDonald, chief executive officer of JCB, as well as top teams from the UK and Dubai, UAE.

Lord Bamford emphasised the excitement of this new relationship and recalled that JCB was dealing with Abunayyan in the 1950s and the parallels between JCB and Abunayyan in terms of corporate values and the generations developing the respective organisations.

“Since our establishment in 1945 and through the generations, the JCB approach has always been one of closeness to our customers recognising the service requirements and the paramount importance of after-sales service. Our watchword is to always look for improvements and there are many similarities in the JCB and Abunayyan business approach in developing strong relations with our customers and exceeding their expectations,” said Bamford.

Saide Hamoucha, the managing director of Abunayyan Trading-JCB, detailed the intensity of delivering on this partnership which began from discussions initiated 16 months ago.

“JCB and Abunayyan are family businesses with many similarities in terms of customer engagement, technology, innovation, customer care, service focus and looking to future product developments. It is obvious we share the same passions,” observed Hamoucha.

Despite the challenging market situation, Abunayyan-JCB has hit the ground running with its customer-centric business strategy.

“After six months of operations, the partnership is covering Saudi Arabia with JCB facilities in Jeddah, Al Khobar, Jizan and Tabuk and more to follow. We have managed to raise our market share from two to 10 per cent in combined segments with JCB increasingly more visible and present in the market across the product portfolio. We are closer to our customers with an active sales force and, aligned with the Saudi Arabia’s Vision 2030, we are focusing on innovation and technology-driven solutions to drive the business,” he added.

In line with this strategic vision, Hamoucha indicated that Abunayyan is investing heavily in the needed resources which include 24 state-of-the-art mobile services vans fully equipped to reach any remote areas, with an advanced control room in the headquarters known as the Uptime Center. This controls the fleet and is a more proactive than reactive technology facility.  The LiveLink monitoring system delivers top level diagnostic and monitoring services to JCB products, which is the only one in the region.

“Our customer-centric approach is to bring service centres close to our customers, in a total of six cities very soon and then 10 cities shortly after. These will provide a wide range of services including the field service fleet, higher spare parts availability, shorter lead times, technical support 24/7 and workshops too,” remarked Hamoucha.

The multi-national JCB has factories across the world and its innovative product portfolio continues to expand with special telescopic skid loaders, access platforms and other products slated for launch in the future.

Abunayyan Trading was one of the first companies in Saudi Arabia to import modern technologies to harness the scarce water resources in the kingdom for agriculture.

Today, the Abunayyan Group is engaged in trading, manufacturing, services and investment dealing in water, oil, gas, and power in Saudi Arabia and across the region.

"Abunayyan Holding is a high-performance driven organisation with a proven history of driving strategic business units towards market leadership," stated Abunayyan.

"Our aim is to extend this success to our new strategic partnership with JCB. Our vision is to lead the industry and position JCB among the top three in the Saudi construction machinery market based upon technology-driven innovation, operational excellence and customer-centricity," he added.-TradeArabia News Service