Metito Brand Guidelines: A 1958 Water Firm, the Ghandour Family & a Dubai Base

A family water business from 1958.

Metito dates from 1958. The company says it was founded that year by the Lebanese engineer and entrepreneur Farouk Ghandour, who was joined in 1966 by his brother Mutaz Ghandour, later the group’s chairman. The 1958 date is repeated by independent sources: when Mitsubishi Corporation and Mitsubishi Heavy Industries announced their investment in July 2014, their release, published by Water Online on 8 July 2014, described Metito as “founded in 1958” and headquartered in Dubai, and the Japanese-language release from Mitsubishi Heavy Industries gives the same year and the same base in the United Arab Emirates.

The company’s own timeline sets out the early decades. It says that in 1972 it introduced a reverse osmosis desalination plant for drinking water, which it describes as the first outside the United States; that is the company’s claim. In 1977, it says, it set up manufacturing in Houston, Texas, and an engineering and design centre in Wimbledon, in south London. Metito describes itself as the first specialist water treatment company in the Middle East, and says the Ghandour family is still at the helm.

The 2014 release gave an outside measure of the business by then: Metito had built more than 3,000 facilities for desalination, water treatment, wastewater treatment and recycling, and ranked in the top five by number of installed desalination plants worldwide, according to the International Desalination Association as cited in that release.

From plant builder to concession owner.

Metito’s business changed shape around the turn of the century. The company says that in 1999 it moved into concessions — long contracts under which it finances, builds and runs a plant — and commissioned a public-private partnership (PPP) wastewater treatment plant at Dubai Investment Park, which it calls the first of its kind in the Middle East and North Africa. In 2007, it says, it reorganised its corporate structure and the International Finance Corporation, part of the World Bank Group, took a minority stake.

China became a large market for a decade. Metito says that in 2008 it formed a joint venture with Berlinwasser to invest in water and wastewater projects there, bought out its partner in 2011 and, in 2017, sold all of its China operations after growing them from two projects to eleven.

In July 2014 Mitsubishi Corporation and Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, with the Japan Bank for International Cooperation, agreed to buy shares in Metito Holdings, from the Gulf investment firm Gulf Capital and other shareholders, Water Online reported from the companies’ release. The release said the deal would let the two Japanese companies expand their water business in the Middle East, Africa and Asia.

Today the work is split across two names on the company’s website. Metito Utilities invests in, develops and operates water and wastewater assets under PPP, concession and build-operate-transfer contracts. The design-and-build business, which the website calls Metipro (Metito Water Projects), is listed against desalination projects including the Galala seawater plant in Egypt in 2018, a solar co-powered desalination plant for NEOM in Saudi Arabia in 2019, and plants mounted on floating barges for Saudi Arabia in 2021. Metito Utilities lists concessions such as a bulk water plant for Kigali in Rwanda, wastewater plants in Dammam in Saudi Arabia and in Namangan in Uzbekistan, water and wastewater plants in Zrenjanin in Serbia, and, from 2023, a seawater treatment plant for ADNOC in Abu Dhabi. It also says it bought the Portuguese water-network specialist DouroECI and set up an African water investment platform with British International Investment.

Design and documentation.

Desalination and industrial water companies sell things that few people ever see up close. Their customers are utilities, governments, refineries, mines and factories, and what they buy is rarely a boxed product: it is a plant, a process, a long operating contract or a membrane that will sit inside a pressure vessel for years. That shapes how these companies present themselves.

The plant is usually the hero. Company websites and annual reports in this field tend to lead with aerial photographs of coastal desalination works, with intake pipes running out to sea and long halls beside the shore. Inside, the familiar image is a row of white or grey pressure vessels holding reverse-osmosis membranes, stacked rack upon rack, or the polished casings of pumps and pressure exchangers that recover energy from the brine stream. Engineers in hard hats and high-visibility jackets on site, checking a control screen or walking a pipe gallery, give the pictures a human scale.

The vocabulary is technical and often trademarked. Membranes, energy-recovery devices and treatment processes carry their own names, and companies list reference plants, countries and project counts the way consumer brands list stockists. Awards from the water trade press and industry bodies are often displayed prominently.

The industry also meets in person. Trade fairs such as IFAT in Munich and Singapore International Water Week bring utilities, contractors and equipment makers to the same halls, and the stands there, with their models, membrane cut-aways and video walls, are one of the few places where these brands show themselves to each other. This guide sets out what can be checked about each company and marks what rests on its own word.

A new shareholder group from 2025.

Ownership moved again in the 2020s. In September 2023 the UAE-based Alpha Dhabi announced a plan to buy a majority stake in Metito Holdings, including shares from Gulf Capital, which it said had exited after a 17-year partnership, and scrapped that plan in May 2024, the Middle East business journal MEED reported on 8 January 2025.

The same day, MEED and Zawya reported that a consortium led by the Riyadh-based Arab Energy Fund (TAEF, formerly APICORP), a multilateral financial institution focused on energy in the Middle East and North Africa, had completed the purchase of all of Metito Utilities from its parent, Metito Holdings. Metito’s own release names the partners as the Zamil Group Investment Company, the investment arm of the Saudi Zamil Group, and the Ghandour family, and says the consortium would also provide growth capital. MEED added that it understood Mitsubishi Corporation and Mitsubishi Heavy Industries remained shareholders in Metito Holdings. Zawya described Metito Utilities as a Dubai-based investor, developer and operator of water and wastewater projects in emerging markets; the company’s release named Rami Ghandour as its chief executive.

The company now describes its aim as becoming the leading developer of water, wastewater and environmental infrastructure based in the Gulf states, and frames its work around the United Nations goal on clean water and sanitation.

For a design guide, Metito shows how a family engineering firm can turn into a holder of long-term water assets while keeping its 1958 name. Compare IDE Technologies, another desalination specialist, and Veolia, a long-established water operator. For this guide we use teal, sand and copper with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Metito’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.