ZARA founder step down as chairman

Amancio Ortega, the richest man in Spain and founder of Zara, is stepping down from his post as Chairman of Zara’s parent company Inditex, as announced at a company meeting this week, according to The Guardian. He founded the company with his ex-wife Rosalia Mera in the early 1970s and has been at the helm ever since. Though Zara is Inditex’s most recognizable brand, the corporation owns over 100 textile companies.

Ortega is definitely seen as the tough powerhouse behind the world’s biggest retailer – and his modest background on the ground floor of retail has definitely helped shape that. Ortega dropped out of school at 13, sold shirts in a store, then starting selling his own bathrobes, and eventually began selling his wife’s designs in a store that started the Zara empire.

Though he’s stepping down, Ortega still retains 59.3 percent of the company’s shares – which is how he’s worth an estimated $31 billion, making him the 7th wealthiest person in the world. His ex-wife Mera still owns 7 percent, so she’s worth a cool $3 billion herself. Pablo Isla, a 47-year-old managing director at Inditex since 2005, is taking over Ortega’s job.

Why’s Ortega stepping down? Well, for one, he’s 75. Two, he’s obsessed with keeping out of the public eye – he’s never given an official interview to the media. In that case, it looks like our only way to understand Ortega’s departure is to guess.

Entrpreneur of the week : Yusuffali M.A

Yusuffali. M.A

The story is familiar: of a young boy arriving on the sandy, windswept shores of an unknown land after a long voyage by ship across the Arabian Sea. It's a story most of the UAE's early Indian and now successful immigrants love to recount of their maiden tryst with Dubai.

The story ofMA Yusuffali is no different, except that his story continues to evolve 37 years and umpteen "dream projects" later. He has built a retail conglomerate with a footprint covering not just Dubai, but all the countries in theGulf Cooperation Council (GCC), Yemen and Egypt. Plans are already underway to foray into India's lucrative retail market in 2012 with Kerala's biggest shopping mall.

"It has not been easy," says Yusuffali, managing director of the Abu Dhabi-headquartered Emke Group, which runs the market-leading Lulu chain of supermarkets, departmental stores, hypermarkets and shoppingmalls. "This growth is my way of giving back to my country, and to this country [UAE], which has given me my bread and butter," he says of the retail empire he has built since landing in the UAE as a teenager to help his uncle MK Abdullah run his small business in the country's capital Abu Dhabi. "We used to do everything ourselves," he recalls, "right from loading and unloading to driving around and selling."

Yusuffali belongs to a traditional business family in Nattika, a village in Kerala's Thrissur district. The background certainly helped.

With H.H Sheikh Mohammed Bin Rashid Al Maktoum,
the Vice-President &
Prime Minister of U.A.E and the Ruler of Dubai.

Emke started by importing and distributing frozen foods, moving on to cold stores, meat and food-processing plants. The big break came in the 1990s when retail was slowly shifting from groceries to large-format supermarkets. Yusuffali launched Lulu's first big supermarket in Abu Dhabi at the height of the Gulf War.



"I always found swimming against the tide more rewarding," he says. "People were leaving the Gulf when I started my expansion." It was risky, but it paid off. He introduced Lulu's first hypermarket in Dubai in 2000, later branching into supermarkets, departmental stores and malls.

Today, Lulu is a household name with a network of 93 stores. It employs 27,000 people drawn from 29 nationalities. More than 19,000 of these employees are Indians. Indians comprise the biggest expatriate community in West Asia, particularly the UAE. It's a big market for Lulu, one of the biggest Indian-owned conglomerates in the Gulf perceived favourably by the price-conscious multiethnic customers. With an estimated 435,000 shoppers walking into Lulu's stores every day, according to industry observers, the chain controls roughly a third of the UAE's organised retail market. Of the Emke Group's annual turnover of $4.5 billion, 60% comes from Lulu.

The brand's growth - the UAE's ruling family "highly supportive" of his expansion plans, says Yusuffali - has been spectacular. Over the past three weeks alone, Lulu rolled out five stores across the Gulf, and is upbeat about reaching its target of 100 stores within this year.

Yusuffali routinely figures in regional power lists as one of the Gulf's most influential Indians. He was elected by Abu Dhabi's business community as the first non-Arab member of the board of directors in the Abu Dhabi Chamber of Commerce and Industry.

Recognition has come from his native land too. A 2008 Padma Shri winner, Yusuffali is a director on the board of Air India and a director of Cochin International Airport Ltd (CIAL).

"I have personally known Yusuffali since his early days in the UAE," says Mohan Jashanmal, a prominent Abu Dhabi-based Indian businessman who has been regional manager of the 90-year-old Jashanmal Group since 1964. "He has never once sought help. Today, he helps hundreds."

NRI businessman Ram Buxani, president of Cosmos-ITL Group and a Dubai resident for over half a century, says Yusuffali is the "real success story of our times". "In an overseas country, you need not just business acumen, but the guts and courage to mingle with locals. Knowledge of the local language, which Yusuffali picked up so well, gave him the extra mileage."


Yusuffali brushes off the praise, saying, "I am a businessman, and my job is to offer good products, good prices, good service and frequent supply."

The Lulu chain is perceived as a value-for-money brand. "Even during the recession when food prices were going up, we froze our prices against any increase in the market," he says. "I travelled to around 11 countries to renegotiate prices with the governments and international manufacturers."

DropBox : the next big thing ?

Silicon Valley has never been this optimistic at the same time careful in financially upgrading out of box ideas. Recently when Valley pundits predicted the over cash flow and irregular distribution of financial support to the ventures, it only turned out to be hoax call as valley is growing organically.

Here is one more promising web-sharing (not web hosting) company which is being seen as the potential venture and in simple words a money maker, through the eyes of PE firms and VCs. According to the company, Dropbox is a free service that lets you bring your photos, docs, and videos anywhere and share them easily. Dropbox was founded in 2007 by Drew Houston and Arash Ferdowsi, two MIT students tired of emailing files to themselves to work from more than one computer.

Today, more than 25 million people across every continent use Dropbox to always have their stuff at hand, share with family and friends, and work on team projects. the company is in expansion mode and hiring technical guys at the lightning pace.

Dropbox is expected to make $100 million in revenue this year and Fortune valuated the company somewhere between $1-2 Billion.

Dropbox provides free hosting till 2GB and is having clear revenue model which makes it even more promising venture.

Thogh dropbox needs to be cautious at certain fields. First of all Dropbox's paid service would get tough competition from the free hosting services. Besudes this Dropbox emphasizes on "Sharing" but unfortunately its multimedia file could be not be shared with social media platforms as there is no sync available.

SPOTLIGHT ENTREPRENEUR : Harsh Bhasker

About twenty minutes into our conversation, Harsh Bhasker pauses to ask if this story will focus on his being a dalit rather than his success as an entrepreneur. "I am not very comfortable talking about that," he says. Having created one of Agra's most-recognised brands in engineering and medical entrance coaching, and a private college, Bhasker, 35, has come far enough to put caste prejudices behind him and speak about his work.

As he enters his office, parents waiting in the reception area stand up to greet him with folded hands. He is, after all, the face of Kota Tutorials, credited with shaping the careers of many youngsters in his city. He is also the rare dalit who in the knowledge business. "Harsh is among the few who have made it big in a knowledge business," says Delhi-based Dalit activist and writer Chandra Bhan Prasad. "He has done this through his own endeavour and without support from anybody else."

FINDING HIS CENTRE 
But Bhasker's isn't a rag-toriches story. Hailing from the Jatav caste, he had the option to join his family's (and caste's) traditional leather shoe-making business. But a rebellious streak led him elsewhere. "I was the stubborn one in the family. I had always set my thoughts high," he says. That focus led him to gain admission at IIT Roorkee (then University of Roorkee) in 1995. "Studying at Roorkee changed my life. I discovered my talents," he says. It was a new world of activities, both on and off the campus, including Himalayan treks, rowing, rafting and parasailing. The shy, smalltown boy transformed into a confident young man.

After completing his engineering in 1999, Bhasker joined HCL in Noida as a software developer. But he found the work too routine and mind-numbing. A year later, he got together seven colleagues to start a software firm out of Katwaria Sarai near the IIT Delhi campus. The company folded up in the wake of the global technology meltdown. Bhasker returned to Agra to start a franchise of Kota-based Career Point in engineering and medical coaching. Those days tutorials were mostly oneperson shows. "I worked hard and established the concept of an organised tutorials business in Agra," he says.

Three years later, he launched his own coaching centre and christened it Kota Tutorials (KT) because "people already knew us as the Kota institute". He started out of a 3-storey building in Agra's commercial district, Sanjay Place. Soon that was falling short as the student numbers swelled. He bought an old shoe factory nearby and restored it. "We didn't have time to raze the old building and build a fresh one," he says. Subsequently, he bought another building behind it. Today, the two structures house 11 airconditioned classrooms with a capacity to teach 2,000 students. There are two hostels nearby to accommodate 250 students, most of whom come from under-privileged backgrounds in rural Uttar Pradesh.