Carla Chahrour

The people of Saudi Arabia have long had an affinity for the Japanese car manufacturer Toyota that has often been attributed to its 60-year partnership with the automotive distributor Abdul Latif Jameel, which was named after its founder.

(Abdul Latif Jameel) 

The company, which has its origins in Saudi Arabia, has been steering the winds of opportunity for more than 75 years, since its beginnings as a humble gas station in the Red Sea coastal port of Jeddah, Saudi Arabia in 1945.

Over the next decade, Abdul Latif Jameel grew into a successful business with a growing workforce and a wide portfolio of gas station forecourts across the country.

(Abdul Latif Jameel) 

In 1955, 10 years after Saudi Arabia and Japan had developed diplomatic relations, Abdul Latif Jameel approached Toyota Motor Corporation as he envisioned a growth in the transportation sector and recognized a growing demand for transportation choice in the country that prompted him to delve into the business of selling cars instead of fueling them.

Interested in Toyota’s longest-running series, the Land Cruiser SUV, Abdul Latif Jameel placed an order of four vehicles, which subsequently led to the appointment of the Saudi-Arabian business as Toyota’s sole distributor in the country.

Toyota Land Cruiser Model BJ Series, 1955. (Abdul Latif Jameel)

The Middle East and East Africa region is a $250 billion annual import market for manufactured goods, with automotives contributing to $87 billion, according to a 2015 report on Saudi Arabia by the McKinsey Global Institute.

Saudi Arabia alone imports $70 billion worth of advanced manufactured goods from the rest of the world every year, with the majority of imports sourced from East Asia and only 5 to 10 percent sourced from within the region. The high total cost of imported goods is due to Saudi Arabia having a big market for manufactured consumer goods that include automobiles with next to no production or assembly of its own.

(File photo/AP) 

The incremental decision to start importing the Toyota four-wheel drive vehicle shortly after it was produced proved to be beneficial during the 1980s, when Abdul Latif Jameel was importing and selling over 200,000 Toyota vehicles per year. The expansive successes obtained aided the company to expand their distribution network by introducing the Lexus brand, which is the luxury vehicle division of Toyota, to Saudi Arabia in 1989.

Since then, Toyota’s market share has remained high in Saudi Arabia, amounting to a 35 percent share of the Saudi market in 2016.

Today, Abdul Latif Jameel has become one of the world’s largest independent distributors of Toyota vehicles as well as one of the largest private companies in Saudi Arabia, spanning various subsidiaries and operating in six different sectors regionally and internationally that include, automotive and transportation, engineering and manufacturing, financial services, energy and environmental services, land and real estate, advertising and media and consumer products.

While there is a large and diverse group of brands that currently sell in the Saudi market and across the region, Toyota remains in high demand and the favorite Japanese car brand among Arabs, according to a YouGov poll commissioned by Arab News as part of the launch of its Japan edition.

The poll, which asked residents across the MENA region for their views on a range of questions related to Japan, found that many Arabs associate Japan with car making, with 56 percent of respondents listing it as one of the things they associate with the country the most.

Toyota’s strong reputation in the region is further highlighted by YouGov’s 2019 BrandIndex, an authoritative measure of brand perception which tracks brands based on metrics relating to the brand’s health, media activity and customer experience. The Japanese manufacturer was categorized at the top of the 2019 BrandIndex for car makers in Saudi Arabia, ahead of German competitors BMW and Mercedes and. Lexus was ranked fourth on the index, above South Korean car-maker Hyundai, which was placed fifth.

Therefore, it comes as no surprise that when Arabs associate Japan with car manufacturing, they think of one brand in particular — Toyota.