Kanan General Group opens in the UAE capital with a family’s long memory of trade and an ambition to bring health technology, and in time local production, to the Gulf.
A family whose trading history runs through the old markets of Hebron has opened a company in Abu Dhabi, betting that the United Arab Emirates’ ports, trade agreements and healthcare spending can turn a regional supplier into a group that builds as well as trades.
Kanan General Group, known as KGG, has been registered with the Abu Dhabi Department of Economic Development as an importing, exporting and general trading company. Its founders say the first priority is healthcare: sourcing medical equipment and supplies for hospitals, clinics and distributors across the Gulf. The longer plan is more ambitious. They want KGG to bring health technology and artificial intelligence to the region’s institutions and, in time, to make locally some of what the region now imports.
“We don’t flood markets. We build them, with discipline, trust and a long-term view.”
Khair Tamimi, Founder and Managing Director, KGG
Hebron, about 30 kilometres south of Jerusalem, has lived by trade for centuries. By the 1500s its glassmakers had established marketing communities in Cairo and in al-Karak, in present-day Jordan, and guarded camel caravans carried their goods to Egypt, Syria and Transjordan. In the 19th century, beads made in the city travelled as far as West Africa, where traders in Nigeria knew them as “Kano beads,” according to histories of the Hebron glass industry. The Hebron Chamber of Commerce and Industry still describes the governorate as the largest economic centre in the West Bank.
The Tamimi name is woven into that history. It is traditionally traced to Tamim al-Dari, a companion of the Prophet Muhammad and, by tradition, a trader himself, who carried goods between Hebron and the Arabian Peninsula. Early Islamic sources record that he was granted lands in and around Hebron, and the family still holds the estate that bears his name. Its roots are in Hebron; today the family lives in Halhul, on the hills just north of the city, where trade has long meant knowing growers, manufacturers and buyers by name and keeping one’s word across generations.
That habit is the company’s starting point. The family built its business on relationships that outlasted any single deal, and it wants KGG to work the same way in a much larger market.
Dr. Talat Tamimi, an economist and one of the co-founders of KGG, has spent his career studying why some markets work and others fail. He holds a doctorate in agricultural economics and marketing from the University of Hohenheim in Stuttgart, Germany, and a master’s degree in agribusiness from Arizona State University. At Hebron University he has taught agricultural economics, marketing and food security and has headed the department of plant production and protection. He has also served on the board of a national agricultural credit institution.
His research on market efficiency and comparative advantage shapes how the family thinks about the new company: where value is created, where it leaks away, and who pays for every unnecessary step between producer and buyer.
“Trade is not moving goods from one port to another. It is shortening the distance between the one who makes and the one who needs. Every unnecessary link in that chain is a cost someone pays, and the markets that win are those that know their real advantage and build on it.”
Dr. Talat Tamimi, economist and KGG co-founder
Dr. Manal Tamimi, a technology and databases consultant and one of the co-founders of KGG, has spent more than two decades at Polytechnic University in Hebron, first running its computer laboratories and, for the past decade, teaching in its College of Information Technology and Computer Engineering. Her courses span digital design, computer architecture, databases, networks and software engineering, and she supervises student graduation projects. Those are the skills the family expects healthcare to depend on as hospitals move their images, records and supply chains onto digital platforms.
“Every hospital is becoming a network. Scans, records and orders now travel as data, and they are only as reliable as the systems that carry them. The companies that lead this region will be the ones that understand the engineering underneath and invest in the young people who can build it.”
Dr. Manal Tamimi, technology and databases consultant and KGG co-founder, Polytechnic University
The choice of base was deliberate. The UAE has become one of the world’s most connected trading economies, with deep-water ports, free zones and air cargo links that reach the Middle East, Africa, South Asia and Europe within days. Its Comprehensive Economic Partnership Agreements, beginning with India in 2022, are lowering the cost of sourcing from a widening range of countries.
Abu Dhabi is also digitising healthcare faster than most of the region. Its health information exchange, Malaffi, launched in 2019, already connects hospitals and clinics across the emirate, and neighbouring Gulf states are building national systems of their own. For a company that wants to supply both equipment and the technology that runs it, that is the market to be in.
The founders describe three ambitions. The first is to be a trusted healthcare supplier, handling medical equipment and consumables with the documentation, registration and storage each product category demands. The second is to become a technology partner for Gulf institutions, bringing cloud and AI platforms for areas such as radiology and enterprise data to the region through exclusive partnerships, and supporting them locally. The third, and the longest-term, is to build: to add local assembly and production so that the region makes more of the medical products it now imports.
The way of working is meant to stay simple. Every order will start from a written quotation that sets out price, currency, lead time, shipping terms and payment. Each client will have one point of contact from first enquiry to delivery. And the company will specialise where regulation demands it rather than trade in everything.
The company’s emblem, a wolf inside a shield, was chosen with that temperament in mind. Wolves are strategic, patient and loyal to their pack.
“The wolf doesn’t chase small wins. It studies, adapts and leads quietly.”
Khair Tamimi
Organisations that want to work with KGG from the start can contact the team in Abu Dhabi.
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