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Wednesday, November 30, 2005
Pakistani entrepreneur acquires French designer - Fashion
THE frills and flounces of couture are to embrace the button-down world of Silicon Valley with the sale of Emanuel Ungaro, the Paris fashion house, to the internet tycoon, Asim Abdullah. The luxury label, best known for its brightly hued floral designs, is being sold by Salvatore Ferragamo, the Italian footwear firm, for an undisclosed price. Ungaro’s resident designer, Vincent Darre, will be dumped in favour of a designer with fresh vision, whose identity has not yet been decided on.
Ungaro has fallen on hard times, running up €21 million (£14 million) in losses last year on revenues of €30 million, according to reports in the textile trade. It is the second loss-making French couture brand to surrender to America this year, following the disposal in January of Christian Lacroix to Falic, a Miami-based duty-free retailer. Ferragamo, which acquired Ungaro in 1996, has been looking for a way out of the high-cost and low-profit world of haute couture and Ungaro has found an unexpected benefactor in the form of a California-based venture captialist.
Born in Karachi, 42-year old Asim Abdullah made his fortune from hi-tech investments, notably the sale of his company Veo Systems, to Commerce One, the business-to-business internet marketplace. He made $300 million (£171 million) from the flotation of Commerce One in 2001 and bought himself a $15 million mansion on Pebble Beach, a highly sought-after piece of California real estate, only to see it burned down by arsonists two years later. Last summer, the entrepreneur was spotted in Paris at Ungaro’s fashion show, the first clue that the Silicon valley millionaire was to become a fashion sugar daddy. Asim Abdullah is an active member of the Pakistani entrepreneurial community in the Silicon Valley. He is a charter member of OPEN's Silicon Valley chapter. I found the following on him in a 2000 issue of Silicon India:
In 1981, teenager Asim Abdullah came to the US from his native Karachi. He enrolled at the University of Michigan to study electrical engineering, and ended up earning a bachelors degree in computer science as well.
After graduating, Abdullah went on to work for Rolm Systems and later for Taligent, a joint venture company started by Apple, Hewlett-Packard and IBM. In 1996, Abdullah quit just months before the alliance was abandoned, and joined CommerceNet, an organization funded by the US government’s Department of Commerce to help the country transition to e-commerce. Since then, he hasn’t looked back — except with success and satisfaction, that is.
As executive director of CommerceNet, Abdullah established global alliances and, even more importantly, established a rapport with Jay Tenenbaum, a technological visionary whose company was the first to conduct an electronic transaction and auction over the Web. In 1997, he and Tenenbaum took technology developed at CommerceNet and started Veo Systems, with the objective of developing technology to facilitate the even more lucrative B2B, or business-to-business, e-commerce. They also secured funding from the National Institute of Science and Technology, a Department of Commerce organization.
According to Abdullah, the biggest challenge for Veo was in crafting XML, a programming language that emerged from the publishing business into a useful tool for software engineering. With that vision in mind, Veo made some smart market moves and assembled a 35-person team, hiring proficient XML programmers from faraway lands including Russia. He also hired two other sets of programming talent: those experienced in distributed objects from, notably, Sun Microsystems, and those that were already crafting e-commerce software.
Veo established a lead over most other companies while Abdullah, its CEO, led
the company to crucial initiatives. Late last year, Veo merged with Commerce One, another hot B2B company poised for an initial public offering. When, a few months later, Commerce One went public, Abdullah was sitting on a pile of wealth. He holds 1.8 million shares of Commerce One that are valued currently at over $300 million.
Abdullah is clearly enjoying the fruits of being an early mover.
formidable ! mucho avant garde !
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