Gold Magazine June - July 2013, Issue 27 | Page 87

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t a low-key ceremony
in Limassol earlier this month, Ali
Al-Tameemi, Chairman
of the Jordan-based
Al-Muthana Group of
Companies, was honoured by the management of Kardex Systems
Ltd for posting the Best Performance of 2012
among all the company’s distributors. Perhaps surprisingly, Mr Al-Tameemi’s awardwinning work was in Iraq, where his business
began to flourish in the 1990s under the
UN’s Oil for Food Programme. “We were
dealing with a lot of international companies
and, after an enforced break, we re-started
in 2003,” he said. “We were promoting and
providing new products, equipment and solutions for a wide range of firms and in 2007
we came into contact with Kardex Systems
and began to supply their products to companies operating in a wide range of sectors –
financial, industrial, manufacturing, automotive, electronics, oil, chemicals and others.”

Ali Al-Tameemi stresses that the company’s successful collaboration with Kardex
Systems Ltd is all down to his team’s hard
work, good media promotion, and the support and feedback from the company’s Cyprus headquarters and its Area Sales Director Demetris Kouloundis, who was behind
the decision to honour the Al-Muthana
Chairman for his remarkable achievements
in 2012 which, he noted, are all the more
impressive given the difficult territory in
which Mr Al-Tameemi is working.
“I wanted to express the company’s
gratitude to him and his sales team in some
way,” he said, “and we thought that he
would appreciate this public recognition by
way of a small but significant award.”
How does Ali Al-Tameemi view his
award? “It has great sentimental value to
me,” he said. “It expresses the company’s
recognition and appreciation for what we
do and gives us the motivation not only
to keep up our good work but to perform
even better. It gives me a feeling of great

satisfaction that all our efforts have been
shown to be worthwhile from the very
start.”
Mr Al-Tameemi’s recent visit to Cyprus was his third but it will certainly not
be his last. “I am actually considering the
idea of residing here,” he said. “Cyprus
has a lot of positive points that I am
considering as an investor and businessman. Cyprus is a safe haven in the Middle
East region and yet it is close enough
for us to be able to deal with clients and
customers quickly and easily. It is a very
interesting location, both for the purpose
of residence and for setting up alternative
business headquarters. Cyprus is well-organised and it is culturally much closer to
the Middle East than any other EU Member State, so it is very attractive to us in a
number of ways. And the fact that it has
honoured me with an award fills me with
even warmer feelings towards the country
and its people, in particular Mr Kouloundis and everyone at Kardex Systems.”