Amancio
Ortega may be the richest man you've never heard of, though the high
street clothes retailer he founded 40 years ago — Zara — is world-famous.
The Spanish
multi-billionaire isn't just the wealthiest person in his own country— he's the
richest man in Europe.
According to Bloomberg, his net worth runs to $70.4
billion (£46
billion), making him the world's third-wealthiest individual, beaten only
by Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates and legendary investor Warren Buffet.
Both Forbes and Bloomberg say
that his net worth is somewhere between $25 billion to $30 billion (£16.3
billion to £19.6 billion) higher than the next-wealthiest European.
And unlike
many of Europe's richest people, Ortega was not born into money. Here's
how the notoriously reclusive billionaire (until a few years ago there
were barely any pictures of him in the public domain) went from humble
beginnings to commanding Europe's biggest fortune.
A rags-to-riches
story
Many of
Europe's richest individuals gain their wealth through their family history. In
the European Union's three largest countries, the richest people are Germany's
George Schaeffler, France's Liliane Bettencourt, and the UK's Gerald
Grosvenor (better known as the Duke of Westminster), all of whom had inherited
their wealth.
That's not
true at all of Ortega, who started his life in relative poverty. According
to Covadonga
O'Shea, Ortega's biographer, his early life was very humble. His
father earned300 pesetas per month — a
meagre salary even for post-war Spain, where the economy took a long
time to recover from the 1930s civil war. To put that in context, a dozen eggs in Spainwould have cost
Ortega's father about a tenth of his monthly income.
In a video,
O'Shea tells an illuminating anecdote from Ortega's
childhood: "They went to buy some goods at the grocery, he heard
someone that told his mother... they couldn't keep giving her credit to buy the
food that she needed for the family dinner that evening."
Ortega left
school shortly after, at the age of 13 or 14 and went to work as a messenger
boy in a shop.
O'Shea says
that experience was formative for Ortega: "This horrible moment in which
he realised the dramatic situation of poverty would never happen again to his
family."
She
adds: “The consequence of that slap on the face he suffered when still he was a
very young boy has been the creation of one of the most important Spanish
enterprises... with a global presence in most of the world.”
Founding Zara
Zara was
founded in 1975, when Ortega was nearly 40 years old, in La Coruna.
According to fashion author Mark Tungate, Zara wasn't
the first choice for a name for the company:
Originally
the store was to be called Zorba, after the character played by Ortega's
favourite actor, Anthony Quinn, in the film Zorba the Greek. He couldn't obtain
permission to use the name, so he played with the letters until he arrived at
Zara, which sounded feminine and exotic (the name should be pronounced the
Spanish way: 'Thara'.)
Inditex was
set up as a parent company to cope with rapid expansion 10 years later, and by
1989 the company had launched in Portugal. It hit Paris and London in the
decade after that.
Tungate goes
on to explain the appeal Zara, which sells high-street styles at more
affordable prices.
The secret to
Zara's appeal is that, although shopping there is cheap, it doesn't feel cheap. The
stores are large, swish and centrally located. The clothes are given room to
breathe and usually — unless it's a Saturday afternoon during the sales — so
are the customers. And then there are the clothes themselves. Zara is renowned
for whisking budget interpretations of catwalk styles into its stores with
break-taking speed. A designer dress photographed on a model during fashion
week won't arrive in a department store for months — but something like it can
be spotted hanging in Zara in a couple of weeks. This infuriates the designers,
but delights customers who can't stretch to the originals — or no longer see
the point of trying.
Zara has been repeatedly praised for its inter-connected supply
chains. The Economist called Zara "perhaps the most
famous example of supply chain agility." Designers, store managers,
and Inditex factories (which do most of their work in Spain) operate like a
well-oiled mechanism.
The company spends little to nothing on advertising. According to High
Point University economics professor Stephanie Crofton, Inditex spends just
0.3% of revenues on advertising, against 3.5% to 5% for other major
retailers, allowing the clothes to simply speak to
themselves.
It's a
winning model — Zara now has 2,000 stores in 88 countries.
The boom years
Zara has now
been around for four decades, but the majority of Ortega's wealth has been
built up over the last 10 years, during which time the share price of Inditex
exploded.
Zara and its
parent company have outperformed through even the financial crisis and
during a period in which the Spanish economy was plunged into a very deep
recession.
The company's
share price has risen by 570% in the last 10 years, and since Ortega owns 59%
of the shares, his net worth has surged upwards too.
Despite
his success, Oretga has deliberately kept a low profile. Until recently there
were extremely few pictures of him, and he has turned down media interviews for
decades.
O'Shea believes one reason Ortega shuns the media spotlight is because
he is modest — he doesn't want to take the sole credit for Zara and Inditex,
which he thinks are a joint effort of the company as a whole.
He
stood down as Zara's chairman in June 2011, at the age of 75.
His daughter,
Sandra Ortega Mera, is Spain's richest woman, inheriting a 7% share in the
company her father founded when her mother died.
He has two
other children, Marcos Ortega Mera and Marta Ortega Perez.
In a foreword to Enrique
Badia's book on Zara, economic historian Carlos Rodriguez Braun sums
up Amancio Ortega's achievements pretty succinctly:
Without any
favourable conditions, in a sector that relies on invention yet restricts
creativity, he decided to fight to the top relying on pure innovation. he found
a great balance between quality and price, shortened the shelf life of his
product by speeding up the design process, selected prime locations for his
stores and extended their operating hours, and all of this was done with the
goal of attracting the casual shopper. He made it all happen.
Ortega
doesn't have much to be humble about, but he is regardless.
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