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Gianluigi Aponte

Gianluigi Aponte Success Story: From Sailor to Shipping Magnate

Italian business magnate Gianluigi Aponte is the founder, owner, and chairman of the Mediterranean Shipping Company.

About Mediterranean Shipping Company.

Gianluigi Aponte established the international shipping company Mediterranean Shipping Company S.A. in Italy in 1970; its head office has been in Switzerland since 1978. The Aponte family owns the privately held business.

Gianluigi Aponte
Image Source: gcaptain.com

The business is active in all significant ports around the globe. With a 4,631,403 twenty-foot equivalent unit intake capacity as of 2023, MSC runs 721 container vessels.

Success Story

For a while, Aponte worked in finance, but he yearned to get back into the maritime business. In 1970, he founded the Mediterranean Shipping Company after raising $280,000 to purchase the German freighter, Patricia. A year later, he launched a second freight ship, Rafaela, named after his wife.

Also Read: How Swiss Billionaire Hansjörg Wyss Built His Empire

By the 1980s, Aponte’s fleet, which primarily operated between Europe and Africa, had grown to 20 cargo ships, which the billionaire sold to transition into container shipping. After purchasing the cruise fleet of his mentor Achille Lauro in 1987, originally operating as Starlauro, he expanded into the cruise line business.

In 1995, the business adopted the MSC Cruises name. Achille Lauro, a passenger ship that was seized by PLF members off the coast of Egypt in 1985 and later caught fire and sank off the coast of Somalia in the Indian Ocean in 1994, was one of the company’s first ships.

The MSC Opera, a ship from the Lirica class that launched the business’s investment in advanced ships, was one of the first such vessels. With the launch of a €5.5 billion funding strategy to create the most cutting-edge cruise fleet in the world, MSC Cruises established itself as a significant player in the global cruise sector during the early 2000s.

In 2014, a new, massive investment project was started, with plans to build new boats as well as refurbish the original Lirica vessels. This expenditure is anticipated to cost $11.6 million between 2014 and 2026, and an even larger Meraviglia fueled by LNG and able to accommodate 6,334 guests is on the horizon.

As a result of its exceptional standards for environmental preservation, health, and safety, MSC Cruises already holds the distinction of becoming the first cruise line in the world to receive the coveted “6 Golden Pearls.”

Gianluigi Aponte shared an award for “Neapolitan Excellence in the World” with Fabio Cannavaro, Ambra Vallo, and other recipients in 2009 from then-Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi at the Teatro di San Carlo in Naples.

Also Read: The Rise of Ivan Glasenberg: Mining Magnate’s Success Story

He received the Cruise International Lifetime Achievement Award in 2012 in honor of his extensive work in the sector. In October 2013, Italian President Giorgio Napolitano bestowed upon him the Order of Merit for Labor title as well as Containerisation International’s Lifetime Achievement Award.

The Aponte family has been listed frequently in the Lloyd’s List of Top 100 Most Influential People in the Shipping Industry, with positions 10 in 2014 and 16 in 2018.

Hansjörg Wyss

How Swiss Billionaire Hansjörg Wyss Built His Empire

Johann Georg Wyss, also known as Hansjörg Wyss, is a Swiss billionaire industrialist who supports political liberalism and environmental initiatives in the United States. He founded Synthes Holding AG and served as its first president and chairman.

His Wyss Foundation has assets worth more than $2 billion. According to Forbes, Hansjörg Wyss had an estimated net worth of over $5.1 billion as of March 2022. He is presently Chelsea’s co-owner in the Premier League.

Hansjörg Wyss
Image Source: news.harvard.edu

Early Life

Hansjörg Wysswas born in 1935 in Bern, Switzerland. His mother was a stay-at-home mom, and his father marketed mechanical calculators. He was raised with his two sisters in an apartment. Wyss graduated from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich with a master’s degree in civil and structural engineering in 1959.

Also Read: The Rise of Ivan Glasenberg: Mining Magnate’s Success Story

He later graduated from Harvard Business School with an MBA in 1965. Wyss spent several years working for a variety of organizations, including Monsanto Europe. He had a side business selling aircraft, and it was through this that he encountered a founding member of the Synthes company, which produces precise medical equipment and joined them in the 1970s.

Success Story

In 1977, Wyss established and assumed leadership of Synthes USA, the American subsidiary of the Swiss-based Synthes, a maker of medical devices that includes internal screws and plates for broken bones. After meeting the AO Foundation’s creator, Martin Allgoewer, and securing approval to market the group’s products in the Americas, he established the business.

In 2012, Wyss sold the business to Johnson & Johnson for $19.7 billion. He got 97.4 million Johnson & Johnson shares and $3.2 billion in cash, according to Bloomberg. Wyss is “among the most philanthropic people in the world,” according to Forbes. Businessweek calculated that Wyss personally gave roughly $277 million in donations between 2004 and 2008.

His charitable contributions grew after the 2012 sale of Synthes. In 2013, he pledged to donate the bulk of his wealth by signing The Giving Pledge. His charitable organizations have assets worth close to $2 billion.

His efforts resulted in the founding of the Harvard University Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering in 2009, as well as the Wyss Foundation, which works to protect the ecosystem. Working closely with regional allies, the Wyss Foundation has already contributed USD 450 million and made it possible to conserve 16 million hectares across the globe in just 20 years.

Also Read: Guillaume Pousaz: From Small Village to Billion-Dollar Empire

Hansjörg Wyss has also contributed to a plethora of projects that support fresh approaches to global problems in the areas of art, medicine, conservation, and humanitarian causes.

He is a part of the group that established Campus Biotech, a center of expertise for biotechnology and the life sciences in Switzerland. Additionally, he helped his buddy Ernst Beyler establish the Fondation Beyeler, which he presided over.

Ivan Glasenber

The Rise of Ivan Glasenberg: Mining Magnate’s Success Story

Ivan Glasenberg is a South African businessman and previous CEO of Glencore, one of the biggest commodities trading and mining enterprises in the world.

Early Life

Ivan Glasenberg was born to a Jewish household in South Africa. His father was a luggage maker and importer born in Lithuania, and his mother was South African. The family resided in Illovo, a Johannesburg neighborhood. In his early 20s, Glasenberg, an athlete, had won the national junior race walking championship.

Ivan Glasenberg
Image Source: mining.com

Glasenberg was born to a Jewish household in South Africa. His father was “a luggage maker and importer born in Lithuania, and his mother was South African.

Also Read: Guillaume Pousaz: From Small Village to Billion-Dollar Empire

The family resided in Illovo, a Johannesburg neighborhood. In his early 20s, Glasenberg, an athlete, had won the national junior race walking championship.

Success Story

Glasenberg began working for Glencore in 1984 and spent time in Australia and South Africa in the coal division. From 1989-1990, he oversaw Glencore’s offices in Beijing and Hong Kong. In 1991, he was named head of the organization’s coal division.In 2002, he was appointed CEO.

Glasenberg was identified by BusinessWeek in 2005 as a significant player in the clandestine commodity dealing of Marc Rich’s business, Mark Rich & Co. AG. Rich, a multibillionaire commodities trader, was subsequently granted a pardon by US President Bill Clinton after being accused of tax fraud and engaging in unlawful business with Iran.

Glencore became the corporate successor to Marc Rich & Co AG. In 2011, Glasenberg began acquiring more Glencore stock through his own dividends, spending up to an extra $54 million. Glasenberg was listed as owning more than 15% of Glencore’s stock in April 2012, making him the 20th wealthiest mining billionaire, according to Forbes, which pegged his total wealth at $7.3 billion.

Ivan Glasenberg was appointed CEO of the combined business after Glencore and Xstrata successfully completed one of the biggest mining company mergers in history, creating an $88 billion company. Originally, Glasenberg would have been President and Xstrata CEO Mick Davis would have been CEO in a merger of equals transaction; however, due to Qatar, a major Xstrata shareholder, refusing to participate, it turned into a takeover target.

Also Read: From Zero to Billionaire: The Inspiring Journey of Piotr Szulczewski

As a result, the new company, Glencore Xstrata, was formed with a 3.05 Glencore to 1 Xstrata share exchange, and Glasenberg was named CEO. In July 2013, Davis quit the company. Since 2002, Glasenberg has served as an executive director of Xstrata. He has also served as a non-executive director of Minara Resources Ltd., Rusal Plc., and Century Aluminum Co. between 2010 and 2011.

Following Glencore’s IPO on the London Stock Exchange, Glasenberg paid £240m in taxation to Rüschlikon. After a public vote, the residents’ tax rate was reduced by 7%, which was supported by a large majority of the villagers but drew condemnation from some of the villagers for what they perceived to be Glencore’s questionable business practices. His net wealth as of 2022 was $9.1 billion USD.

Guillaume Pousaz

Guillaume Pousaz: From Small Village to Billion-Dollar Empire

Guillaume Pousaz, the CEO and creator of the online payment system Checkout.com, is a Swiss billionaire businessman living in Dubai. His estimated net wealth as of January 2022 is $20 billion USD.

About Checkout.com

Checkout.com is a global provider of financial technology that manages payments for other businesses. It was established in 2009 under the name Opus Payments and is based in London, United Kingdom. It was the most valued European fintech company in 2022, with a valuation of over $40 billion.

Guillaume Pousaz
Image Source: telegraph.co.uk

Its customers include Coinbase, Netflix, and Pizza Hut. Every year, the website processes hundreds of billions of dollars in payments, with volumes tripling in each of the last three years as a result of the pandemic’s massive use of online payments as well as the growth of cryptocurrencies, with Checkout.com being used by many online exchanges.

Also Read: From Zero to Billionaire: The Inspiring Journey of Piotr Szulczewski

Early Life

Before enrolling in a bachelor’s program in economics at HEC Lausanne, Pousaz completed mathematical engineering coursework at the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne.

Pousaz originally intended to work in investment banking, but he left his Swiss university in 2005 when his father was diagnosed with cancer. With no money in the bank and after failing his economics finals at the age of 19, Guillaume Pousaz went to California to become a surfer.

The Swedish academic dropout joined the processing firm International Payment Consultants after running out of money. With the help of the IPC head of sales, Pousaz founded NetMerchant in 2007, a service for sending money from the US to Europe. The business was active until 2009. In 2009, he acquired a Mauritius-based small payments firm named SMS Pay for $300,000.

Success Story

In 2009, Pousaz established Opus Payments in Singapore, allowing businesses in Hong Kong to accept payments from clients all over the globe. In 2012, Opus Payments changed its name to Checkout.com. The goal of the business’s founding was to help customers and merchants with the issue of processing internet payments.

Checkout.com secured $230 million in the capital in 2019. This was the biggest Series A funding round a European fintech company had ever received at the moment. Checkout.com raised an additional US$450 million in January 2021 at a US$15 billion value.

Because of this, Forbes pegged Pousaz’s net wealth at $9 billion. He is the CEO of the company and owner of approximately two-thirds of Checkout.com. In May 2021, Pousaz established Zinial Growth, a personal business company. The company has invested in cryptocurrency startup Snickerdoodle Labs as well as e-commerce start-ups Wayflyer and Ziina.

Also Read: Inventive Journey of James Dyson: From Failure to Success

Checkout.com was valued at $40 billion in January 2022 following a $1 billion fundraising effort, providing Pousaz an approximate net worth of US$20 billion. With an estimated net worth of £19.259 billion, he came in at number five on the Sunday Times Rich List 2022 ranking of the wealthiest individuals in the UK.

Piotr Szulczewski

From Zero to Billionaire: The Inspiring Journey of Piotr Szulczewski

Piotr Szulczewski, a Polish entrepreneur and computer engineer, founded Wish.com, a mobile-first e-commerce site that specializes in low-cost goods. According to Forbes, he is Canada’s youngest billionaire.

About Wish.com

American online marketplace Wish facilitates trade between buyers and vendors. Instead of just using a search bar format, the platform visually customizes the shopping experience for each customer.

Piotr Szulczewski
Image Source: forbes.com

It enables vendors to post their goods on Wish and conduct direct business with customers. Wish does not stock the goods themselves or handle returns; instead, it collaborates with payment service companies to handle payments.

Also Read: Inventive Journey of James Dyson: From Failure to Success

Early Life

Piotr Szulczewski moved to Palo Alto, California, just before earning his degree from the University of Waterloo at the age of 23. He then started a four-month internship in coding for Google. He later started working for Google full-time, where he created the initial algorithms for the keyword expansion feature, which facilitates finding items from advertisers.

Piotr Szulczewski moved to South Korea in June 2007 to work in the brand-new Google headquarters. In 2009, he was able to quit Google with enough savings, and he then spent six months living at home writing the code for a platform that recommended ads based on an individual’s browsing history and predicted interests.

ContextLogic, a software business he founded with Yelp CEO Jeremy Stoppelman, obtained $1.7 million in funding in 2010 as a result of his efforts.

Success Story

Danny Zhang, who was working at Yellowpages.com at the time, accepted Szulczewski’s invitation to join the new firm as a co-founder, and the two rebranded it as Wishwall. me in 2011.

ContextLogic was offered $20 million by Facebook after they heard about the new technology, but Szulczewski turned it down. According to Szulczewski, his main objective with Wish.com is to build “the largest, most convenient, and most affordable shopping mall in the world” and to cater to low-income households.

Also Read: Alexandr Wang: From MIT Dropout to youngest billionaire

Over 5 million people visited Wish.com every day in 2016. Szulczewski was ranked as the 21st richest entrepreneur under 40 in America in 2016 and as the 1605th richest person in the world according to Forbes in 2019.A

According to a 2019 list, he was the 5th richest Polish billionaire, the 34th richest Canadian, and the youngest billionaire in the country. He avoids the limelight and gives interviews infrequently despite his success. In 2017, the Polish media conducted an interview with him for the first time. Szulczewski made plans to leave his position as CEO in 2021.

James Dyson

Inventive Journey of James Dyson: From Failure to Success

James Dyson is a British industrial designer, billionaire businessman, farmer, and inventor, who established Dyson Ltd. He is best known for developing the dual cyclone bagless vacuum cleaner that employs the cyclonic separation principle. With an approximate wealth of £23 billion, he is the second-richest individual in the UK, as per the Sunday Times Rich List 2022.

James Dyson
Image Source: wired.com

Early Life

James Dyson encountered many setbacks and disappointments from his earliest years. But he was adamant about making a significant impact on the world. While a student at the Royal College of Art in 1970, Dyson contributed to the creation of the Sea Truck.

His first unique creation, the Ballbarrow, was a wheelbarrow modified to use a ball in place of the wheel. This was covered by the BBC television show Tomorrow’s World.

Also Read: Alexandr Wang: From MIT Dropout to youngest billionaire

He made the decision to monetize this and build a company around it. James Dyson initially attempted to sell directly to the garden and home shops, but no one was interested, so he established a mail-order business and sold the Ballbarrows to customers.

While it was originally a huge success, over the period there was a decline and the business was engulfed in enormous amounts of debt. He made the decision to monetize this and build a company around it.

James Dyson initially attempted to sell directly to the garden and home shops, but no one was interested, so he established a mail-order business and sold the Ballbarrows to customers. While it was originally a huge success, over the period there was a decline and the business was engulfed in enormous amounts of debt.

Success Story

James Dyson was no longer trusted by anyone, but he wasn’t quite ready to give up. Despite being exhausted, despondent, and heavily in debt, he had plenty of creative ideas. His biggest strengths were in this. He proceeded to start over completely from the beginning.

Dyson came up with the concept of using cyclonic separation in the late 1970s to make a vacuum cleaner that would maintain suction as it gathered up dirt. After five years and roughly 5,127 prototypes, Dyson released the “G-Force” cleaner in 1983, partially funded by his wife’s income as an art instructor.

Dyson’s product was introduced in Japan via catalog sales because no maker or dealer would handle it in the UK because it would disrupt the lucrative industry for replacement dust bags. It received Japan’s International Design Fair Prize in 1991.

In 1980, he submitted a number of patent applications for his dual cyclone vacuum cleaner, EP0037674. Following the main manufacturers’ rejection of his invention, Dyson founded his own manufacturing business, Dyson Ltd.

The Dyson Dual Cyclone outsold some of the businesses that turned down his invention and went on to become one of the most well-known brands in the UK.

Also Read: From Engineer to Entrepreneur: The Rise of Kyle Vogt

From 1986 to 2001, Dyson leased the technology in North America to Fantom Technologies before entering the market on its own. As a result of his success, other significant makers started to sell cyclonic vacuum cleaners of their own.

Hoover (UK) was sued by Dyson in 1999 for violating their patent. According to the High Court, Hoover intentionally duplicated a key component of his patented designs when creating its Triple Vortex bagless vacuum cleaner line. Hoover consented to make a £4 million loss payment.

James Dyson has demonstrated to us the value of tenacity and creativity. His failure served as motivation for his achievement.