Mo Fakhro – Personal Page

Mo Fakhro (Mohammed Adel Fakhro) was born in 1978. He was born to Adel Abdulla Fakhro, a Bahraini businessman, and Mona Yousif Almoayyed, a Bahraini business woman. Both of his parents are prominent business people whose families have a long business history of success in Bahrain, the Arabian Gulf, and India.

He attended the Ibn Khuldoon school and graduated in 1996 with high distinction. While in middle school and then high school, he developed a keen interest in the family business and used to spend a lot of time discussing business with his father during long walks and jogs every evening.

In high school Mo excelled particularly in math, economics, and physics, and scored amongst the top 1% in the world on American standardized tests (SATs and APs) on these subjects.

After finishing high school in 1996, he moved to the United States to further his education. He was accepted to Cornell University in the United States, which he went to for one year, starting with a combined major in Electrical Engineering and Economics.

While Cornell is itself an excellent university, he was driven from his high school days to go to Stanford to be a part of the entrepreneurial technology culture that he had read so much about but was not able to be a part of (Stanford had not accepted him for his freshman year). On his second try, he applied to and was accepted to Stanford in 1997, and became the first Bahraini to attend Stanford in modern times.

He majored in Economics at Stanford, and came to the realization that all of the major societies and companies over history had developed, more than anything else, through invention and innovation. He decided then to dedicate a significant portion of his career towards finding ways to innovate and invent existing technologies. He graduated with honors in June 2000, and wrote his graduation thesis on the impact of patents on innovation in the genomics and biotech industries. He concluded that patents need to be increased in length in order to encourage more investment in R&D. Later that year, he moved to Boston, MA to set up his own business to develop applications for the mobile internet, which he ran for a year. 

The United States and Stanford imprinted in him the ideology of freedom of expression, fairness, equality, and the celebration of differences between people, that he carries with him daily.

After that Mohammed moved back to Bahrain, straight into the main family firm on his father’s side, Abdulla Yousif Fakhro Group, and immediately started to look into new ventures.

Among these were; the car rental businesses in the UAE and Qatar, various restaurant franchises in Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, and Kuwait, as well as the car distribution and repair business. 

He has also contributed to some of the group’s existing businesses, including the car rental business in Bahrain, and to some of his father’s personal businesses and properties.

He has split his time between his family businesses and his own businesses. Today, his own businesses have developed to be a conglomerate in their own right, named MBA Fakhro Group.

MBA Fakhro Group today owns its own businesses in e-commerce, business software, education, foods, social networks, fitness, infrastructure, and media among others.

MBA Fakhro Group aims to keep developing across the world in innovation and is active in India, the United States, and Europe, in a number of technology related businesses. He has maintained a cultural closeness to the US and aims to continue to develop his technology businesses there.

In addition to its focus on innovation, MBA Fakhro Group has also established a significant presence as a franchisee of international brands including Applebees, Anytime Fitness, and EtonHouse

Mo married Dahouk al Aswad, a British-educated beauty, of Damascene and Turkish origin, in March 2012,

and is a dedicated family man to his two children; Maryam who was born in 2013, and Adel (named for his father), who was born in 2015.

Mohammed became the youngest ever person to be elected to the board of the Bahrain Chamber of Commerce and Industry in 2013, where he chaired two committees, the Entrepreneurship committee, and the Internal Audit Committee.

He was also appointed to the board of directors of Tamkeen (the Labour Fund) in 2015 and is also currently a board member of Ibn Khuldoon school. He served as a board member of al Muntada Society as Treasurer from 2012 to 2018.

In his free time he writes articles and poetry, and spends at least two hours every day learning about new technologies in the fields of computer science, genomics, and mechanical engineering in order to keep steering MBA Fakhro Group’s businesses and R&D efforts in these fields towards the cutting edge of development. He spends a significant percentage of his time travelling for work to India, the United States, Europe, and China. He is also a member of YPO and enjoys meeting people from chapters around the world.

Although he finds innovation and learning especially fulfilling, Mo more generally aims to keep the Fakhro group of companies as a significant force in the next generation, not just in Bahrain, but across the Gulf, and the rest of the world.

He hopes the Fakhros will continue to enjoy the close knit and warm family relationships that they do today, and continue to pass on to the next generation the values of hard work, integrity, and commitment to the customer and to the communities in which they operate.

He feels that, while it is easy to sit on one’s laurels and enjoy the fruits of the established businesses, to be successful a family business must always strive to adapt and look for new horizons.