Slight stature but big on ambition

AMMAN // Randa Ayoubi looks like she might disappear behind an oversized desk in her palatial office overlooking Amman.

Plants tower over her, lining the vast white room. She may be slight of stature, but her earrings are huge - and so are her ambitions.

Ms Ayoubi is not one to do things by halves.

She is the creator of Rubicon, the multimillion-dollar animation and production company that has partnered Paramount, MGM Studios and CBS Television Networkand is now considered one of the most successful businesswomen in the Middle East, let alone Jordan.

"I'm known among my shareholders to wear very big earrings," she says, fiddling with a heavy dangling jewel-studded earring.

"They joke with me that they're heavier than my weight."

Ms Ayoubi, who is 49, has built from scratch one of Jordan's most successful international companies, and from the beginning has set herself a global ambition.

Revenues at the company stand at about US$40 million (Dh169.9m), which Ms Ayoubi says is about seven times what they were in 2006.

She expects revenues to increase by at least an additional $10m in the next few years.

The business, which started with just $140,000 worth of investment in 1994 in Amman, has now grown its presence in Dubai, Doha, Los Angeles and Manila.

The company's net worth is now in the "hundreds of millions of dollars", says Ms Ayoubi.

Now Rubicon has partnerships with international entertainment giants such as Paramount and MGM.

Even when Rubicon pitched its first big animation, Ben & Izzy, in 2006, it was described by The New York Times as "perhaps the most memorable "pitch stunt" among the nearly 300 proposals for series [that the American cable television operation Cartoon Network] sifts through each year".

The plot revolves around the tumultuous relationship between an American boy, Ben, and his Jordanian friend Izzy, and although its purpose is to be entertaining, it became a symbol of a bridge between the West and the East.

"September 11 happened and I felt obliged to mesh the original idea [of two cultures meeting] with what was happening in the rest of the world," says Ms Ayoubi.

An elaborate PR exercise in 2006, a black-tie dinner at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in Manhattan attended by hundreds including Queen Rania of Jordan, paid off, and now Rubicon is producing the second series of the animated cartoon.

Since then, Rubicon has gone from strength to strength.

Construction is under way to build a 75-hectare entertainment resort in Aqaba, Jordan, that features a Star Trek-themed attraction, developed by Paramount.

The Red Sea Astrarium resort secured $1.5 billion of investment, partly funded by the King Abdullah II Fund for Development to build and design the 17 themed attractions.

King Abdullah is a Star Trek fan, or trekkie, himself, and is even rumoured to have made a cameo appearance in an episode of Star Trek:Voyager, although Ms Ayoubi says this was not the reason why Rubicon decided to feature the attraction.

"All my shareholders are trekkies, everyone seems to like the show."

The company also launched an iPhone app last week, and is about to launch two 3D movies slated for release in the next two years, one based on the British cartoon figure Postman Pat - a big achievement for Rubicon, Ms Ayoubi says - and another American partnership based on the children's book Life & Adventures of Santa Claus.

Ms Ayoubi's ambitions have always been big.

Whereas in past interviews she has pitched her company as a rival to Pixar, the American computer animation film studio, now she says: "We're beyond Pixar. It's only a matter of time.

"We're not just animation anymore, and Pixar is just about animation."

Rubicon has the backing of a solid circle of investors that include GrowthGate Capital, a Gulf private equity buyout company, which secured a 30 per cent equity investment in 2009.

Getting the backing of shareholders was a long struggle for Ms Ayoubi.

She says she survived on an initial investment of $140,000 for 10 years before breaking into the mainstream.

When the company first launched in 1994, most business people regarded Rubicon's concept of technology-based animation and production as "madness", she says.

"[The idea] was a long shot, a far-fetched idea in all aspects, from the technology part of it which in our part of the world is like 'what? What is this?', to getting people to invest in something that's not a farm, factory, it's ideas," Ms Ayoubi says.

"Even when we started and we were very small and didn't have any money, we didn't try to compete with the next-door neighbour, like other Jordanian companies, or in Lebanon or Egypt, we always thought of ourselves as a global company."

The concept of Rubicon has been a lifelong project of Ms Ayoubi's - to merge education and entertainment.

"We don't like to brand ourselves as educational because it always makes kids cringe, but we do say that we are an entertainment company with a purpose," she says.

"We don't do stuff that is useless and unethical … but it's fun and the messages are never direct like you have to study and be responsible.

"It's always a story that leads the child and viewer to want to be like the character they're seeing."

Fresh out of Texas Tech University, a 22-year-old Ms Ayoubi landed her first job in a bank in Jordan but "hated it with a passion".

"It was too restricting and it had no soul, I like things with a soul, so I quit.

"I said, I'm going to create a company and show them how you can make money and be a human being at the same time," she says.

Her main driving force has been the importance of education in moulding a child, and so, with a heightened disparity in Jordan's education sector, particularly for children in the country's small villages, Ms Ayoubi suggested her first business model - a minibus delivering educational CD-Roms, which she produced, to under-educated children.

She admits it was a far-fetched idea at the time, not least because of the technological know-how required for the production, but she adds that she was surprised how "rejected the idea was. [Investors] wouldn't even sit down and listen".

But Jordan has since come a long way, she says, and now young Arabs are taking her lead and setting up their own high-tech companies with global ambitions.

"I would like to set for young Arabs an example that it is do-able, that we're capable of doing whatever we set our minds to," she says.

"[To show] we are capable of standing shoulder to shoulder with the best of the world."

business@thenational.ae