Our Divisions
Each division runs as its own business with its own leadership and P&L. They share back-office infrastructure, a common standard for delivery, and decades of relationships in the Ethiopian market.
Advisory & Investments
Advisory services, strategic investments, and the Group’s capital holdings.
Carcon Capital is the Group’s advisory arm and its investment vehicle, a new entity through which the Group consolidates more than fifteen years of advisory and investment work, work previously delivered through partnerships, individual contracts, and long-standing partners. The advisory practice traces back to the Group’s earliest days: Antonio built a construction advisory practice from the quality and delivery reputation of the construction business, and Adamandia ran financial and accounting advisory out of the same office. Over time that work grew through partnerships and the founding of NICAD Services (2012) into a formal consultancy. Today, Carcon Capital consolidates all of it under one roof: senior advisory to institutions and private clients across the EU-Africa corridor, alongside the Group’s direct investments and strategic equity holdings.
What We Do
Policy and development advisory. Team-lead and technical-expert engagements on private-sector development, labour markets, entrepreneurship ecosystems, and trade policy, usually commissioned by multilateral or bilateral donors and delivered alongside government counterparts.
Construction consulting. Independent technical and commercial advisory on construction projects, drawing on the Group’s four decades of general-contracting experience: feasibility studies, design and specification review, technical due diligence, contract structuring, and owner’s-representative engagements for clients building in Ethiopia.
Market entry and investment structuring. For European and Middle Eastern clients investigating Ethiopian opportunities, and for Ethiopian firms seeking external capital. We have supported private-equity feasibility assessments, due-diligence market research, and PPP engagements.
Institutional and family-office advisory. Strategy, governance, and succession support for family businesses and institutional clients, delivered jointly with two long-standing partners: an Ethiopian advisory firm with deep on-the-ground market experience, and a Cyprus-based firm specialising in helping global family offices access emerging markets. Grounded in our own experience as a second-generation family business in transition.
We Invest, Too
We are not only advisors, we are investors. The Group is a founding shareholder of Awash Bank, Ethiopia’s largest private bank, with continued strategic shareholdings in United Bank, Enat Bank, Abyssinia Bank, and Awash Insurance. Carcon Capital manages these positions and evaluates new opportunities in sectors where the Group has operational knowledge, particularly financial services, real estate, industrial inputs, and infrastructure-adjacent businesses.
How We Engage
Our preferred engagement model is secondment, partnerships, and consortium, we bring our expertise into client teams or join consortia alongside other consulting firms and implementation partners. Smaller, direct engagements (family-office, targeted market entry, policy papers) are handled in-house.
Selected Engagements
Evaluation: €300M Budget Support to Ethiopia
Team lead on the comprehensive SOE and financial-sector assessment and the policy trigger matrix for AFD’s bilateral budget support disbursement to the Ethiopian Government.
Investment Guide to Ethiopia for EU Businesses
Prepared under the EU Delegation and Ethiopian Investment Commission, plus two major policy briefs on vertical integration and facilitating EU SME investment.
National Trade Policy Framework
Supervised the team preparing Ethiopia’s Trade Policy Framework, policy statement, and implementation plan, commissioned by UNDP.
Ethiopian Entrepreneurship Fund
Structured the fund facility, financial model, investment and risk management strategy, and fund-manager prospectus, following a nationwide mapping of 200+ start-ups and high-growth SMEs.
Value Chain assessments — Ethiopia & Tanzania
M4P value-chain and livelihoods analysis across 12 sectors and 1,500 interviews, with intervention plans projected to impact 200,000 farmers and workers.
10-Year Review of Private-Sector Development
Reviewed a decade of Ethiopian government and stakeholder efforts in private-sector development, with a synthesis of the policy and regulatory drivers of growth.
Institutional Clients
Geographic Footprint
Based in Addis Ababa with partners in Nicosia and London. Delivered engagements across Ethiopia, Tanzania, Malawi, Nigeria, Rwanda, Kenya, Togo, the UAE, Malaysia, and the Maldives.
Construction
General contracting in Ethiopia since 1985.
Construction is the founding business of the Group. Legally registered as Geom. Antonio Carnevale General Contractor, we build residential, commercial, religious, institutional, and industrial structures across Ethiopia, including some of the country’s most recognized landmarks: the Egyptian Embassy Residence in Addis Ababa, Kidane Mihret Cathedral in Meki, the Boeing Engine Testing Cell for Ethiopian Airlines, and the Salesians of Don Bosco Regional House.
We operate from a 3,200 m² facility at Megenagna in Addis Ababa, hold BC-3 contractor registration, and run a directly-employed team of approximately 150 with up to 600 contract labourers on active projects.
What We Build
Mixed-use and residential towers. Most recent: Agober 2B+G+13, Olympia 1B+G+9, Cathedral G+4.
Religious and institutional buildings for Catholic dioceses, congregations, hospitals, and embassies, our longest-standing client relationships.
Industrial facilities for aviation, agro-processing, and logistics.
How We Work
Our Construction division works primarily on a direct-negotiated basis with repeat private clients, the Catholic Church in Ethiopia, and diplomatic missions, not through public tenders. What brings clients back is consistency: quality of workmanship, delivery discipline, and long-term site stewardship.
Equipment Fleet
8 trucks, 2 excavators, 2 dozers, 2 backhoe loaders, 2 chain loaders, 6 concrete mixers, asphalt plant, crusher, and specialized finishing equipment.
Long-standing Clients
Portfolio
See the full project catalog
Filterable by sector, commercial, residential, religious, diplomatic, industrial, interiors.
Light Manufacturing
In-house wood and metal workshops for construction and fit-out.
Our manufacturing division supplies fit-out elements for Group construction projects and for external clients. Two specialized workshops operate from the 3,200 m² Megenagna facility alongside the construction fleet, staffed by long-tenured craftsmen trained on our own sites.
Wood Workshop
Doors, in-home furniture, kitchen cabinetry, and finish carpentry. The wood shop produced the interior fit-out for the Salesians Don Bosco Regional House, Kidane Mihret Cathedral, Yegna Apartments, and multiple recent residential towers. Standard doors and custom joinery both.
Metal Workshop
Steel windows, door fixtures, balustrades, railings, and custom metalwork for commercial and residential buildings. Heavier fabrication on the Group’s record includes structural elements for the Ethiopian Airlines Boeing Engine Testing Cell.
Why It Exists
Vertical integration gives our Construction division quality control over finishing, usually the weakest link on Ethiopian construction sites. For external clients it means a domestic supplier for components that would otherwise be imported at materially higher cost and longer lead times.
Working With Us
We accept external orders for doors, fixtures, built-in furniture, and custom metalwork, subject to workshop capacity. Contractors and architects can reach the workshop lead via the Group’s construction line.
Import/Export
Specialist trade in construction materials and technical inputs.
Import/Export is the Group’s trade division, operating under the Alessandro Import Export name. It continues a commercial track record that began in 1995 with AMCAST PLC, an import-export business the Group operated until 2009, handling construction machinery, ceramics, tools, and high-end Italian goods with annual turnover of more than USD 1M.
Construction Materials
Waterproofing systems, finishing materials, concrete admixtures, and specialist construction inputs sourced from European and Middle Eastern suppliers. Product lines are selected for projects we have seen underperform because lower-cost substitutes were used, which means the materials we import are specified first for our own construction work, and sold to other Ethiopian contractors on the same basis.
How We Work
Long-term supplier relationships over transactional trading. Our family’s thirty-year trade history, combined with the Group’s construction insight, means we know which products actually perform in Ethiopian site conditions and which do not. We carry the full import cycle ourselves: supplier negotiation, licensing, forex, customs clearance, and local distribution.
Working With Us
European and Middle Eastern suppliers seeking a reliable Ethiopian import partner are welcome to reach out. Contractors and projects needing specialist finishing materials, the same. Contact: partnerships@carconcapital.com.
Tech & Art
Innovation, technology, and the arts: looking to the future.
Tech & Art is the Group’s innovation arm. Its purpose is twofold: first, to apply technology and sustainability solutions across the Group’s operations (construction, manufacturing, trade, advisory) and make them sharper, more efficient, and more future-ready; and second, to build standalone ventures in digital services and the arts that we believe have room to grow in Ethiopia and the region. The division grew out of NICAD Services (2012) and is led by second-generation Group members with development-economics and ICT4D experience.
Current Ventures
Two ventures are currently semi-operational under Tech & Art. MOSERA is a mobile workforce platform that was built to connect job seekers to opportunities via USSD, IVR, and SMS, reaching feature-phone users excluded from smartphone-based platforms. Designed over 15 months on the basis of surveys covering 6,000 job seekers and employers, it is still in development. BUCHILA is a curated e-commerce platform for global consumers, currently in early commercial stage.
More broadly, we are actively exploring innovation and sustainability solutions, digital tools, data, and process improvements, that can be deployed across the Group’s operations.
The Arts
The Group holds one of the larger private collections of Ethiopian art assembled over the past two decades. Building on that foundation, we are developing an arts venture focused on buying and selling contemporary Ethiopian and African art, curated exhibitions and gallery programming, and long-term collaborations with galleries and museums of modern and African art internationally. For us, this is the next chapter of a long-standing interest: making the arts a serious business line, not a side passion.
Partners & Investors
We are selectively open to partners, collaborators, and investors across both sides of the division: technical and capital partners for the digital ventures and sustainability work, and galleries, museums, collectors, and curators for the arts venture. Contact: partnerships@carconcapital.com.
Talk to the right division.
Each division has its own lead and P&L. Tell us which one you want to work with: advisory & investments, construction, light manufacturing, import/export, or tech & art, and we’ll introduce you directly.
Contact UsAddis Ababa, Ethiopia
Group Headquarters
Nicosia, Cyprus
European Operations