Eyes on the West

New, highly advanced products such as the ?M?-series motor grader, seen in the centre of the picture, offer a better and more efficient way of doing b

Sheikh Fahad, Executive Vice President of Zahid Tractor suggests western KSA is ready for new technology and radical development.

Of course there are shops lining the streets of downtown Jeddah, but mostly these are fulfilling a specific need or function. For example, the main drag through town has a great number of car and parts dealers, interspersed with hardware stores and, somewhat bizarrely, about a dozen shops that stock French-style chandeliers.

Giant light fittings aside, there aren’t that many ‘lifestyle’ shops on the streets – stores that might be fun to visit, such as you might find in a mall, but there is one exception.

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On the side of a busy street, small boys and their fathers press their noses up against the window of the shop, which is full of branded caps, sportswear, toys and other related paraphernalia.

Interestingly, this shop doesn’t print the brand of some major football team, or even a self-congratulatory ‘swoosh’ or diagonal stripes. Instead, it sells stuff with the brand of an industrial machinery manufacturer all over it – and the masses can’t get enough.

Sound unlikely? Not when you realize that the brand in question is Caterpillar, surely the most recognised marque of heavy equipment in the world.

Caterpillar
So, it will come as no surprise that the family name most associated with Cat is nearly as well known as the brand itself. Zahid Tractor has been the sole dealer of the famous yellow machinery in the Kingdom for over forty years and is one of only two Cat dealers across the whole GCC.

As you might expect, this makes the Zahid family a pretty big name in the Gulf, and none is bigger than Sheikh Fahad Y. Zahid, the executive vice president of the company.

The group has sold Cat machinery through good times and bad – from the near collapse of the Peoria factory in the early 1980s, through to the boom times of the mid 2000s.

Today of course, the machines are highly sophisticated, with complex electronics allowing the machines in most cases to be operated with just a pair of joysticks, rather that the banks of levers and pedals of old.

Saudi Arabia has generally been regarded as a price-sensitive country, but Sheikh Fahad believes that this is no longer the case: “When the electronic and laser guided systems were first fitted in the equipment about ten years ago, [Caterpillar] was really looking at the western hemisphere and maybe one or two far eastern countries for application.”