Rock Vision Investments
Rock Vision Investments is the Zabadne family’s investment company. We hold and grow assets across real estate, operating businesses, and market-entry ventures in Nigeria, Syria, the United Arab Emirates, and the United States.
1952
Arrival in Nigeria
Walid Zabadne founds the business in Lagos
1968
Manufacturing begins
The family’s first factory in Nigeria
800+
Factory workforce
At the operation’s height
3
Generations
Damascus · Lagos · Dubai · United States
What we do
We are not a fund with a deadline. We are a family company that buys things we understand, holds them, and improves them over time.
01
Residential and commercial property in Lagos, Damascus and Dubai, acquired to hold. The family’s property interests grew out of decades of operating in Nigeria, and remain the anchor of the portfolio.
02
Manufacturing, distribution, and specialist equipment. The family has built and run companies employing hundreds of people, and still prefers businesses with a physical operation behind them.
03
Positions we intend to keep. Where we cannot add operating value ourselves, we hold rather than trade. The measure is what a holding is worth in twenty years, not this quarter.
The people behind it
First generation
Walid Zabadne arrived in Lagos in 1952 and went into the distribution trade. Over the following decades he built it from a distributorship into a manufacturer, negotiating directly with American and Japanese principals for the right to represent them in Nigeria.
By the 1970s Zabadne & Co Ltd held the Nigerian representation for Whirlpool, Maytag, Akai, and Pioneer, and employed more than eight hundred people at its height.
Second generation
Ahmad “AJ” Zabadne has spent close to thirty years in international business across the United States, Europe, Africa, and the Middle East — in manufacturing, travel and tourism, airport security, telecommunications, airline management, and specialist protective equipment.
He is the owner and chief executive of Rock Vision Investments. In 1997 he served as President of the National Association of Nigeria Travel Agencies, and he founded and leads Elite Sterling Security in the United States.
Third generation
Walid Zabadne Jr. is Chief Operating Officer of Rock Vision Investments and runs the company day to day. His current focus is the trading business — the import and export of apparel between the United States and Syria — alongside the family’s property holdings in the United States, Dubai, and Syria.
He started in the family’s businesses at Elite Sterling Security in 2013, working alongside his father through 2021. He also founded and runs Moonlight Marketing Solutions, and holds a business degree from the University of Colorado Denver.
Operating perspective
Our judgement was formed on a factory floor in Nigeria, not in a spreadsheet. That is the difference we bring to the businesses and buildings we own.
From the archive
Photographs and records from the family’s private collection — from a Lagos showroom floor to the pages of the Daily Times.
Enquiries
Tell us what the opportunity is and who is running it. We will give you a straight answer either way.
