Spain
Fecha Martes, junio 22 @ 08:30:53
Tema Top Entrepreneur


Once a 'poor' man of Europe, Spain now has a dynamic economy and a new generation of entrepreneurs

When Marcos Enriquez, 29, co-founded Spanish internet portal Ozu in 1996 he had to use his credit cards to raise some of the capital. As with any internet start-up worth its salt, Ozu's first office was someone's sitting room.

When no one came to their ski-mountainwear shop in the Pyrenees, the Barrabes brothers went to a ski station car park, jotted down the registration numbers and checked if the same cars were to be found in their village. To attract customers, the brothers blagged their way into international trade fairs and stocked up on equipment unavailable elsewhere which they now sell through barrabes.com.

Marcos Guillen of Red Internauta, a fresh-faced 28, has to endure being called "Marquitos", or "little Marcos", by some of his clients. That hasn't handicapped his internet empire building - Marcos already has a six-year-old success story under his belt: Ran Internet, Spain's leading hosting domain. Red Internauta is just his latest baby. And when one of the Torrado brothers, Juan, 31, decided to set up Arrakis, an online newspaper and internet provider, it wasn't easy to sacrifice his well-paid job and his own flat to move back home to his parents. But his gamble paid off - last year British Telecom paid £9.5m for Arrakis.


All of them have pioneered lucrative companies in an industry new to Spain. In the process they have become millionaires. Only 15 years ago Spain was regarded as a "poor country". Today it has the fifth most dynamic economy in Europe. Having previously been dogged by chronic unemployment, reaching 27 per cent in 1995/96, government reforms have turned the economy around. "Spain's economy is doing very well, it's got very strong growth of well over 3.5 per cent over the last few years and unemployment has come down tremendously," says David Thwaites, European economist at the BNP-Paribas bank.

"There's a bit of a problem with inflation, it's currently running at 3 per cent as opposed to an EU average of 1.7 percent. But as e-commerce and employment rates grow, that should sort out the inflation."

In the past, making your fortune in Spain often involved extreme measures - for example, in the bullring. This classic route to riches, and glory on the pages of !Hola!, is still going strong - just witness the superstardom of 17-year-old Julian Lopez, "El Juli", a youth whose claim to fame is nearly 200 ears (cut from vanquished bulls) in a short career.

But in increasingly "wired" Spain, a more accessible - and less dangerous - fortune beckons. Terra Networks, a collection of internet service providers, went public last October and the whole of Spain jumped to attention. At its highest point, Terra had a £20bn valuation, making the newcomer the fourth-biggest company on the Spanish stock market. "Spain hasn't been very entrepreneurial until recently," says David del Val, 31. "There were no role models of young people taking a risk and becoming successful. But that has started to happen in Spain in the last year." Del Val became one of those role models by launching Vxtreme, a company developing internet video technology in 1995. Two years later Bill Gates snapped up the company for a reported £47m.

The Spanish hope to colonise the South American and Hispanic North American markets - if they can move quickly enough. In 1999, an estimated 16.2m Spanish speakers logged on to the internet - that figure is predicted to rise to 134m by 2005. And Spanish-language internet providers, like Terra Networks, are already battling the likes of Yahoo! and AOL to capture the emerging market.

Make way for the internet conquistadors.

Spain's Young Rich

1. Marcos Guillen, 28

Director of Red Internauta.Valued at £29.6 million

2. Marcos Enriquez, 29

Co-founder of Ozu, a Spanish language web search engine. Valued at £18.3 million

3. Carlos Barrabes, 29

Co-owner of Barrabes.com, specialist in ski/climbing gear. Valued at £3 million

4 and 5. German Torrado, 23, and Juan-Ignacio Rodriguez, 29

Co-founders of Arrakis, an online newspaper and internet service provider bought by BT for £9.5m. Valued at £2.4 million each


Sandra Jones. Sunday March 12, 2000
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