Who exactly is Hamid Muhammad aka AYA?

By Watchdog reporter

Muhammed Hamid (born in 1976) 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.

Hamid was born in the Sudan circa in 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 Impe. He fell in love with the country and stayed.

The younger Muhammed 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 15 acres (6.1 ha) piece of land in Kawempe, 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 in 2004, FIFI Transport Uganda Limited, which is “a leading hauler in the East and Central African region”, with a fleet of more than 3,000 Mercedes-Benz Actros trucks. He was also the owner of Hilton Hotel until he sold it to a Danish Company early this year.

In Dubai, he owns a trading company that deals in general merchandise across Middle East and Africa called Aya Mohammed Trade plus a real estate firm in Manhattan, New York, USA, that deals in both residential and commercial properties.

Some of his Assets in Uganda;

The AYA estate
AYA Investments (U) Ltd Manages a diversified portfolio of industrial and commercial real estate.

AYA Mills
AYA Mills operates one of the largest commercial milling facilities in East Africa and is home to some of the region’s finest flours. The facilities utilise modern equipment, including state-of-the-art Ocrim mills, which are capable of producing up to 8,500 tonnes of flour per month.

AYA Mining
Last year, the AYA Group established the first gold mining facility in Uganda. The project is expected to expand its operations into the processing of metal from other east African nations.

AYA Biscuits
Aya Biscuits operates the newest and most modern biscuit-making facility in Uganda, utilising the latest Polin Machinery imported from Italy.

Pan Afric Commodities Ltd
The leading millers of wheat flour in Uganda, the company’s mills are located in Kawempe, Kampala. Pan Afric Commodities was one of the 10 finalists in the 2005 Investor of the Year Awards.

FIFI Transport Uganda Ltd
A leading hauler in the east and central African region, the company has state-of-the-art trucks capable of handling containerised and bagged freight. Major routes of FIFI Transport include the port of Mombasa in Kenya and Kampala. They also operate in Southern Sudan.

Aya Bakery (U) Ltd
The largest commercial bakery in Uganda, the company supplies fresh bakery products daily to Kampala and central Uganda.