UK

"Grit, Rigour, Humour. It applies equally to our sports ventures. Business doesn’t always go swimmingly. It can be challenging, unpleasant, even dirty. We can’t have people shy away from facing up to the tough times. Grit is an essential quality. Rigour is the opposite of winging it. Lack of rigour doesn’t cut it in INEOS. Do your job fully, and well, and with pride. Prepare thoroughly and if you don’t know the answer to a question say so, but never twice. In my humble opinion the Americans do rigour better than anyone because they exist in such a competitive marketplace. The UK is slipping. And humour simply makes the world go around. Life is short and to be enjoyed. Personally, I struggle if life is too dry. You need to enjoy some banter, and don’t get too hung up on the woke agenda."

"China and the Middle East are regions where our ambitions have grown. Whereas Europe, and particularly the UK, are squeezing the life blood out of manufacturing, with overburdened legislation and excessive energy costs, stemming from poor energy policies, China has blossomed. In its pursuit of self-sufficiency, it has built an immense industrial infrastructure of the highest quality. To illustrate, if you take ABS plastic, which is useful for car dashboards and refrigerators, amongst myriad other uses, China was barely a player in 1990, with a trivial market…"

"Early on we were predominantly European, with two thirds of our profits coming from this large, sophisticated market. Germany, Belgium, Norway and France led the way. We struggled with competitiveness in Italy and withdrew. The UK has been a disappointment. Skills are not what they were, energy is expensive, unions have been aggressive (unlike Germany, where the unions focus on encouraging employers to invest for future growth), although to be fair they have been much more constructive and willing to engage in proper discussions about the genuine health of our businesses over the last ten years, and the government has been uninterested or lacklustre at best. America has been resurgent on the back of world-beating energy costs and frankly fine management. Whereas Europe has slowly squeezed the life from much of its manufacturing base with carbon taxes, complex legislation, high labour and social costs, America has gone into overdrive."

"During an era of low interest rates, when aggressive acquirers crowded the private market in Sweden, Lifco shifted its focus to less competitive markets such as the UK, Germany, Italy, and the Benelux region. This international expansion has been a significant success, and Lifco has been able to acquire companies of at least the same quality in terms of operating margins at the same prices."

"Lagercrantz’s International division plays a key role in executing this export-focused approach. It extends the group’s successful “niche products” strategy to global markets by building product-specific companies within the division itself. This model, already proven within the group, has led to the formation of successful clusters—such as the marina cluster—and has fueled the growth of companies like Schmitztechnik in Germany and DPC Ilse in the UK."

"In the following years, I challenged various markets with clothing sales as the core, experienced several failures, and made some business friends. In the end, I established "Fast Retailing Co., Ltd.". Currently, the company not only carries out Uniqlo's retail business throughout Japan, but also opens Uniqlo specialty stores in countries and regions such as the UK and China. In the process, we learned a lot of valuable things from our customers and our partners. What makes me proud is that the company also has a large number of hard-working excellent employees. On this occasion, I would like to express my heartfelt thanks to the directors and employees of the company for their great support and encouragement to me who is not very good in the past years."

"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!"

"Solomon Kerzner was born in Durban, South Africa, on 23 August 1935. He was, however, a citizen of the world. He had homes in London and the Chiltern Hills in the UK, the south of France, New York, Johannesburg and the Bahamas, as well as his beloved Leeukoppie estate in Hout Bay, Cape Town."

"He managed to make some money in Bordeyri by learning to bind notebooks and selling them. He then used his earnings to buy sheep, paying farmers to keep and feed them. In turn, he sold lambs to those involved in the booming export trade to the UK’s fast-growing cities and bought more sheep with the proceeds. After five years he had cash in hand and a good-sized herd. After his stay in Bordeyri, Thor was hired by a merchant in Borgarnes on a decent wage. But he still kept his sheep and expanded further, buying land in Borgarfjordur and hiring a keeper. Within a short time, he became the town’s leading sheep farmer, again making his money from the export trade."

"So why revisit the misery of the collapse of all three of Iceland’s major commercial banks, brought to their knees by difficulties in financing their short-term debt and a run on deposits in the UK? With the nation’s consequential pain all too tangible, why look back when I want only to study the road ahead? And why get involved in Icelandic controversies again when I have already learned – from the one interview I gave in 2008 – that telling my side of the story only invites more questions and heavier criticism?"

"After the collapse of Northern Rock in August 2007 and subsequent concerns about other UK-based banks, what I had seen as a secure deposit base and a strength began to weaken. After the collapse of Lehman Brothers a year later, UK investors began a general run on bank deposits which was to pose jurisdictional questions in previously uncharted waters. Icesave became a problem because its UK deposits were held by a UK branch of Landsbanki, rather than by Heritable, which was a British bank wholly owned by Landsbanki. In hindsight, this was a major mistake by the management. I have to admit that, right up to the weekend of the collapse, I was unaware of such technicalities. It only started to dawn on me that this could be a difficulty when I spoke to the prime minister on 2 October. I can see it clearly now. Iceland is not a member of the EU, but an Icelandic bank had opened a branch in the UK, under EU regulation, and accepted deposits. So there was a jurisdictional issue – an issue that came to the fore over the weekend of 4–5 October 2008, as Iceland’s financial crisis unfolded."

"Another similarity is the oligarchies that had emerged in pre-crash Russia and in Iceland. I would estimate that in 2008 about 30 people controlled Iceland’s economy, out of a total population of 300,000. That is one in 10,000: not an excessive concentration of power compared with, say, the US or the UK, but the extent of what Iceland’s political and financial oligarchs controlled was, as with their counterparts in Russia, disproportionate, which in such a small country created a huge imbalance."