Family businesses often face a predictable tension at the third generation: preserve what worked, or build something new. Fady and Hassan Jameel, who serve as deputy presidents and vice chairmen of Abdul Latif Jameel, appear to have resolved that tension by treating the two as the same thing.
Their grandfather founded the business in Jeddah in 1945 with a gas station. Their father, Mohammed Abdul Latif Jameel, expanded it into a global Toyota distribution network, an early-stage investment in electric vehicle manufacturer Rivian, and one of the largest family philanthropies in the Middle East. Fady and Hassan have taken on distinct but complementary roles: Fady oversees international operations; Hassan leads the Saudi Arabia business, which includes mobility, real estate and machinery.
Both spent formative years in Japan, absorbing the management culture of Toyota from the inside. Hassan joined Toyota’s domestic kaizen division in 2004 as its first non-Japanese member. Fady trained in Australia. Their father studied at MIT. The generation before them sent a family member to a Toyota training program in the late 1960s, at a time when a Saudi traveling to Japan for professional development was, as Fady Jameel has described it, unprecedented.
That accumulated exposure to different working cultures — Japanese precision, American entrepreneurialism, Saudi operational scale — has shaped how the two brothers describe what they are trying to build. Profit matters, but it is not the only measure. Purpose matters. People matter. The front line matters as much as the boardroom.
Fady Jameel has said that empowering the front line is a core aspect of the business — not a slogan, but a structural choice. The company leaves space for people to take decisions and take chances. What that looks like in practice is captured in stories like the continuous improvement in practice example of a stock yard driver in Jeddah who identified a lane reassignment that cut his team’s daily workload from hours to minutes, then raised it through proper channels and had the change made. Hassan Jameel met the driver personally to recognize the contribution.
The same approach governs larger decisions. Abdul Latif Jameel was the first major investor in Rivian in 2012. The family kept the investment quiet for eight years while the company developed, traveling to Detroit regularly to work closely with Rivian’s founder. They structured the investment in tranches, tied to milestones, and built on a relationship rather than a transaction.
Hassan Jameel has said that he cannot think of a single time in his life when the company acquired a business with the intention of selling it. Long-term is not a holding period at Abdul Latif Jameel. It is the operating mode.
As the company moves into its ninth decade, the questions it faces are larger than distribution margins or aftersales rankings. Electric vehicles, autonomous transport, air taxis, renewable energy, water treatment, machine-learning applications in health — these are the sectors where Abdul Latif Jameel is now placing its attention. Hassan Jameel has spoken directly about the future of mobility at a high-profile congress in Riyadh, outlining what he believes traditional automotive businesses must rethink as the market shifts beneath them. The answer, as he tells it, starts with the same principle his grandfather modeled: stay close to the problem, stay humble about what you don’t know, and keep improving.