Alan Sugar launched Amstrad with £100 of savings and a £50 van
In 1968, at 21, Alan Sugar took £100 out of his Post Office savings, bought a van for £50, insured it for £8 and started selling car radio aerials and other electrical goods from the back. The company, Amstrad, took its name from his initials plus the first letters of trading.
Born in Clapton, Hackney, on 24 March 1947, the son of a tailor, Sugar grew up in a council flat, earned the lasting nickname Mop head for his curly hair and worked at a greengrocer's as a boy. He left school at 16 and briefly worked as a statistician at the Ministry of Education before going it alone.
Amstrad's edge was price. By 1970 it was manufacturing, making hi-fi turntable covers by injection moulding, far cheaper than rivals' vacuum-forming, and it went on to amplifiers, cassette decks and tuners that undercut the competition. Listed on the London Stock Exchange in 1980, the company doubled its profit and value every year that decade. Its CPC 464 home computer of 1984 sold three million units despite fierce rivals, the 1985 PCW 8256 word processor cost a fraction of an Apple Macintosh, and in 1986 Amstrad bought the Sinclair computer line.
The 1990s were harder. Unreliable Seagate hard disks wrecked the reputation of its business PCs, and although a court ordered Seagate to pay $153 million in damages, Amstrad never recovered in that market. A 1990 games console, the GX4000, flopped against Japanese machines with better game libraries. In 2007 Sugar sold his remaining stake to BSkyB for about £125 million.
Football was a sideline. After a takeover fight with Robert Maxwell, he bought Tottenham Hotspur with manager Terry Venables in June 1991, but fans resented his businesslike approach, and in nine years the club won only the 1999 League Cup. Since 2005 he has been the boss on the BBC's The Apprentice, and he joined the House of Lords in 2009.
Source: Alan Sugar
