Bahige El-Rayes joins Bain & Company as a partner

After spending fourteen years with Kearney, Bahige El-Rayes has joined Bain & Company as a partner in London.

Educated in his parents’ native Lebanon, Bahige El-Rayes has been working in the strategy segment of the consulting industry for close to two decades. After starting his career at Beirut-based Near East Consulting Group, he then moved on to OC&C Strategy Consultants in Abu Dhabi, where he spent some two years working on commercial due diligence, market entry and growth strategies for companies in the region.

El-Rayes then joined Kearney (at the time A.T. Kearney), where he became one of the firm’s youngest partners, and also one of its best travelled having served the consultancy on three continents (the Americas, Middle East and Europe).

“I always find myself in between different worlds and different personalities, and I'm able to adapt accordingly,” said El-Rayes about his international profile.

In his most recent role at Kearney, he was a member of the global Food & Beverage leadership team and co-led the Consumer team in the UK & Ireland. He specialises in strategy, business model, value chain, and large scale transformations in the retail and consumer goods sectors, as well as on supply chain and operations work.

His track record includes helping a retailer drive a $1 billion EBITDA improvement project (El-Rayes led multi workstream teams), supporting a major FMCG player with portfolio strategy work, and helping another consumer goods company with defining its market entry approach across emerging markets such as China, Brazil and Eastern Europe.

El-Rayes also helped two North American Food companies with implementing their post-merger integration roadmap, several corporates and private equity groups with mergers & acquisitions, and a large consumer packaging player with innovation and new product development, among others.

Now at Bain & Company (primarily based in London, with co-focus on the Middle East), El-Rayes advises executives on making decisions that are good for their businesses – and not to forget – good for the future of our planet.

“What I do is show executives the trade-offs and help them think about how to solve them, because it’s not easy,” he explained. “I like that challenge.”

“I want to extend my sincere gratitude to all my friends at Kearney whom I had the chance to collaborate with over the years. I am very fortunate to have met great people,” he said of his switch. “Now at Bain & Company, I am excited by the culture and depth of the firm’s capabilities and look forward to share them with my clients.”