Bader Nasser Al-Kharafi

Vice chairman and CEO, Zain Group

Origin: Kuwait

Residence: Kuwait

Sector: Telecoms

Al-Kharafi oversees Zain Group’s operations in seven Middle East and African countries. The company registered a 6 per cent increase in net profit to $640m in 2022 while revenues soared 14 per cent to $5.6bn. He also managed the completion of Zain Saudi Arabia’s SAR3.02bn tower assets deal with Golden Lattice Investment in January. Al-Kharafi is championing the digital transformation of enterprises and government entities in the Middle East. Zain’s ICT solutions provider, ZainTech, partnered with global cloud service providers in 2022, including Amazon Web Services and Oracle, to accelerate cloud adoption. 

With more than 20 years of industrial experience across the financial, banking, industrial and telecoms sectors, he manages Zain Group’s global workforce of more than 7,100 employees that caters to the company’s 52 million active individual and business customers. He sits on the boards of Gulf Bank Kuwait, Coca-Cola (Kuwait), United Stainless Steel Company (Bahrain), Foulath Holding (Bahrain) and UNHCR’s sustainability board.