“Success is will and work, and is not linked to one place or another.” With these words, the Syrian businessman “Abdul Malik Al-Okla” summarizes the story of his success in foreign countries and his transformation from a refugee who fled the hell of war to one of the businessmen and owner of one of the largest car trading companies in Sweden.
When Martin Luther King said, “I have a dream,” he did not just say it, but he supported his statement with action. The dream is the foundation of the path for everyone who wants to achieve success in any profession, and it is the idea on which the dreamer’s actions will be based in order for the dream to come true. Some may call it a risk or a risk. Greed, but I see it as an ambition that can be achieved with will and work, according to Al-Okla.
The Arabs said, “He won the bold pleasures.” In these words, the Syrian businessman “Abdul Malik Al-Okla” speaks after he struggled to prove to those near and far that asylum is a stage in a person’s life, and not a destiny with which a person ends his life.
The refugee who arrived in Sweden from Lebanon at the beginning of 2014 is the same businessman who took his company and business to the global level, with his trade covering five continents of the world today.
Al-Okla talks about the beginnings of his departure from Syria while speaking to Human News, saying: “In 2012, we were displaced from our country, Syria, to Lebanon as a result of the war that destroyed the people and the country, and at the beginning of 2014 we moved to Sweden through the United Nations.”
He added in his speech: “The new life began with studying and I learned in the school dedicated to teaching the Swedish language to newcomers, where I spent only three months to move on to distributing vegetables and foodstuffs in a small transport vehicle, and in this work I directed myself to the new families who came to Sweden.”
Al-Okla, 39 years old, is married and has three children. During his talk to Human News, he tries to spread positive energy and spread everything that would encourage ambitious people to move forward in achieving their ambitions.
However, Human News asked a question about the difficulties that Al-Okla faced on the way to his success, and the answer was the following:
“It is not easy for any person to start a new professional life from scratch in a country other than the country in which he was born and grew up, especially since the language that is the means of communication and the key to any person’s entry into society is a new and strange language, meaning that it is not one of the most common languages, but that It all fades away in the face of determination coupled with hard work.
The biggest challenge was the presence of commercial lobbies that were intolerant of the nationalism from which they came. The situation was like commercial mafias doing everything necessary to hinder newcomers in the car trading market.
Their methods were not always ethical or legal, and they sometimes resorted to practices that were, to say the least, unethical.
But the response to them and their practices was to insist on achieving the goal, and not to pay attention to conflicts that do not serve the process of achieving the goal.
The next project after trading in vegetables and foodstuffs was the opening of a wholesale distribution center in the largest city in the Skara Bori region in which we live. The center was in continuous development until it became one of the most successful and best-selling centers in Sweden.
The above was only a step followed by a step towards achieving the goal, and therefore I made the decision to exit the partnership in the wholesale distribution center and headed to the European car market, starting with the Swedish one.
Al-Okla added: After I studied the English language, I traveled to Africa in 2017, and I did not know anyone in this country, but I met a person at the airport and asked him to take me to the duty-free market in Africa.
Al-Okla continues: “Most of the merchants were from Lebanon, and in less than two months I learned the French language so that I could speak with the merchants in this market. Then I returned to Sweden and opened a company that exports cars.”
According to Al-Okla, the bureaucracy of laws in Sweden and the piles of paperwork that this means was a new and not easy obstacle that stood in his way, but it gave him experience in legal dealings with regard to the labor market.
He mentioned in his speech: “The road for selling cars in Africa was not paved, waiting for me to pass over it. Rather, a number of mistakes occurred that almost destroyed my ambition, but my brothers standing with me helped me to persevere until I found the easiest and safest way to transport cars to the African market.”
The next step was to expand the business and turn the sole liability company into a joint-stock company, with a capital of more than one million US dollars, making the possibility of competing with his company smaller and smaller.
He now had a large number of employees, including employees from Africa, Lebanon, Sweden, and Norway. After this work and expansion, the company became in need of large management, and more than one person, and after his brother was working in restaurants, he moved to the company and began working in it.
According to the words of the Syrian businessman: “At the beginning of 2021, the Corona crisis began, and I was unable to travel to the African market or even go outside the home. During this period that I spent at home, I contacted my brother so that he could travel and take over the company in Africa, and there became a great demand.” We sell cars, as every month we transfer more than 100 cars to Africa.”
Al-Okla adds: “We expanded the project, and we worked on purchasing large freight cars from Greece, and expanding the business further. After that, we bought land to place the cars on, and we bought a house to become a management office. The project succeeded with large capital, and we gained a good reputation in The market, while selling was now based on images only, and merchants now have great confidence in the company.”
Al-Okla concluded his speech by saying: “At the end of 2021, we opened a new company in Africa, and this year the beginning was good, but after the end of the Corona crisis, the Western media began to declare that the refugee is the one who influences and sabotages the country’s economy by deceiving the systems, so the pressures became The number of refugees is increasing, and this is why we moved and opened a new company in Britain.”
