Poland

"The doubts seemed to be quickly dismissed. The move to East Germany initially became a successful model. The new companies, which were formally subordinate to Ilbau as a subsidiary of Bau Holding, grew to 700 employees within a few months. Just one year later, the East German subsidiaries were conducting so much business that the total group’s revenue shot up by 15 percent. Haselsteiner then targeted other markets, including Poland and the then still-existing Czechoslovakia, alongside Hungary where he was already active. In Hungary alone, Bau Holding was active with five own companies. Shareholders enjoyed substantial profits shortly after the IPO - in 1991, a dividend of 20 percent was paid. It was a golden time - sales expectations were corrected upwards almost monthly. By the end of the financial year 1991/92, Bau Holding had generated more than ten billion Schillings (700 million euros). For Austrian standards at the time, this was an incredible revenue. And the group was highly profitable: the profit amounted to 400 million Schillings (29 million euros). By 1993/94, the revenue had grown to 15 billion Schillings (1.1 billion euros) - an increase of 50 percent in just two years. Profits also continued to rise - although not quite as sharply: They now amounted to 450 million Schillings (32 million euros)."

"I’ve decided I never want to retire. I’m in this for life and completely focused on Iceland, apart from owning or having stakes in a hairdressing salon, a vodka distillery in Iceland (the country), property businesses in Poland and the UK, a film production company, an ice-making business, a media monitoring agency, an African biofuels company, a chain of restaurants and an upmarket fish and chip shop. That diversification bug that plagued us through our early years has certainly proved hard to shake off!"

"“In that way, most of my ventures wouldn’t exist. Primarily, you must act as a pioneer. This is how it was with the motorway, the breweries, and telecommunications. And Era is the first mobile phone network in Poland. I had the courage to pave the way for others.”"

"The US launch has given the company’s staff a boost in confidence. Less than a week later, the first store in Spain opens. Over the following years, Stefan Persson cuts ribbons at new H&M stores in countries including Poland, Portugal, and the Czech Republic. H&M now sells more than five hundred garments per minute worldwide. And Stefan Persson has fulfilled his promise of reaching America."

"In the process, and at his scale (which is not yet the same as that of Kuhlman, Motte, and Gillet, alongside whom he almost seems like the poor relative), Boussac attempts to establish himself in Alsace without success; but, on Léderlin’s advice, he pulls off a nice move: the low-cost purchase, in Poland, of a German-manufactured plant under sequestration, Zyrardov, near Warsaw, with 3,000 workers."

"Mobile telecoms was a sector I knew well, having grown Play, my start-up in Poland, into a top-four independent challenger brand, and although Chile was on the other side of the Atlantic, it did bear some similarities to Play’s Polish homeland. Both were Catholic cultures with a high degree of conservatism. Another element they had in common was their domination by international behemoths. While Play in Poland was up against France’s Orange, Deutsche Telekom’s T-Mobile and Polkomtel, whose Plus brand was 24 per cent owned by Britain’s Vodafone, Nextel Chile had to contend with Entel, the former nationalised Chilean telecoms company whose 127-metre Torre Entel literally towers over central Santiago. Entel controlled about 30 per cent of the Chilean mobile telecoms market. Then there were Movistar, owned by Spanish giant Telefonica, which held a market share of around 28 per cent, and Claro, part of the America Movil telecoms giant, famously fronted by Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim, which had 23 per cent. Nextel Chile had possessed about 2 per cent of the market as a total underdog, and even that was falling steadily. However, we had grown Play from nothing into the leading mobile telecoms company in Poland with a 27 per cent market share, and we saw a similar potential growth trajectory for this Chilean minnow. The financial elements of a deal had to be put together very quickly. We completed the whole transaction in about two months and it was only later that we learned how close Nextel Chile had actually been to bankruptcy wipe-out. We refinanced the company with $400 million of equity and $420 million of debt and set about finding a way to rebrand and reposition it as a vibrant independent challenger brand – a far cry from its previous image as a distant South American offshoot of a major US carrier."