Mohammed Hamid (entrepreneur)


Mohammed Hamid is a Ugandan business magnate and investor. He is the chairman and majority shareholder in the companies of the Aya Group.
According to Forbes in 2015, he was the second richest African under 40, after Tanzanian multi-millionaire Mohammed Dewji.

Background

Hamid was born in the Sudan circa 1976. In 1987, he traveled to Uganda for the first time to visit his elder brother, Mohammed El Hamid, who operated a commodity trading business called Pan Afric Impex. He fell in love with the country and stayed.
The younger Mohammed worked with his elder brother until the early 1990s when he started his first company Pan Afric Commodities, also a commodities trading business. Later, he bought a milling machine from Premiere Mills, one of the companies owned by businessman Sudhir Ruparelia. In 1997, he bought a piece of land in Kawempe, a suburb of Kampala where he relocated the machinery and started milling wheat. Later he bought more mills and started baking bread and confectioneries.
Later, he started a trucking business, FIFI Transport Uganda Limited, later renamed Panafric Transport, which is a leading hauler in the East and Central African region", with a current fleet of hundreds of heavy duty Scania and MAN prime movers and semi trailers
. One of his companies, Aya Investments, is the developer of the Kampala Hilton Hotel, under construction since 2006.