Egyptian billionaire Nassef Sawiris seeks to invest $50bn in US infrastructure
Industrialist’s latest pivot comes as he merges OCI Global into Abu Dhabi-listed Orascom in major business overhaul
Egypt’s richest man Nassef Sawiris is seeking to invest up to $50bn in US infrastructure projects and is consolidating his publicly traded holding companies in Abu Dhabi in a big pivot of his business interests.
Sawiris, who also owns the English football club Aston Villa, is close to concluding a break-up of his Dutch-listed chemicals and fertiliser group OCI Global, which has sold off more than $11.6bn worth of assets in the past two years.
After winding down the asset sales, Sawiris is now merging OCI into his family’s legacy business Orascom Construction in a deal that will be announced on Monday.
The newly merged company will be listed in Abu Dhabi. Sawiris has recently redomiciled to the emirate and Italy after a high-profile exit from the UK, where tax changes have prompted the departures of several billionaires.
The business will focus on infrastructure investment in the US, where it is seeking to capitalise on a surge of spending in areas such as data centres while leveraging Orascom’s expertise in construction and the more than $1bn in cash and other proceeds on OCI’s balance sheet.
The company plans to invest its own capital and partners’ funds in US infrastructure via equity and credit investments in the coming decade.
“We want to focus the next stage of our business on the area we see the biggest opportunity, which is infrastructure,” Sawiris told the Financial Times.
He said Orascom, like some of the most successful companies in the sector such as France’s Vinci and Spain’s Ferrovial, had an advantage from its deep experience in construction and project management.
“Any day, these companies will be more successful than a bunch of bankers who do desktop analysis of an asset and then struggle to create the most value,” Sawiris said.
Private capital firms have flooded the infrastructure space in recent years, with funds led by BlackRock’s GIP and Brookfield Asset Management among the biggest players.
The industrialist has been critical of the private equity sector, telling the FT this year that the industry’s best days had passed.
Orascom already operates in US infrastructure via its subsidiary Weitz, which it acquired in 2012. Weitz has built projects such as data centres, airport terminals and university housing.
Sawiris, whose fortune is estimated by Forbes at almost $9bn, is the youngest son of the late Onsi Sawiris, who founded a construction company in the 1950s and built it into the large multinational corporation now called Orascom.
The latest move marks the latest big pivot of Sawiris’ career, coming after his focus on chemicals and his initial presence in cement. Sawiris sold Orascom’s cement business to the French group Lafarge in 2007 for more than €10bn.
OCI and Orascom generated a combined internal rate of return of more than 39 per cent between Orascom’s listing in 1999 and the end of 2024 and returned more than $22bn in dividends to shareholders, according to an audit performed by KPMG.
Last year OCI sold its global methanol business to US specialist Methanex for about $2bn, marking the Amsterdam-listed group’s fourth transaction since undertaking a strategic review in 2023.
The company has been exploring options including a sale of its final European assets.