Irishman transports world entrepreneur title to South Africa
South African representative, Bill Lynch, originally from Ballybunion, Co Kerry, won the top prize at Saturday night’s awards ceremony in Monte Carlo.
Mr Lynch is chief executive of Imperial Holdings — a South African-based company that last year generated revenues of $6.5 billion (€5.14bn) from fleet management, car rental and importation, vehicle and forklift leasing and sales, and aviation.
Imperial has interests in large parts of sub-Saharan Africa, Germany, Belgium, Holland, Poland and Britain. In Ireland, it owns the aviation services business, Air Contractors, based in Swords, Co Dublin.
“This is really a recognition of the management and what we’ve achieved over the past few years and it’s nice for South Africa — a country who’s business interests are sometimes neglected on the world stage,” Mr Lynch told the Irish Examiner.
Mr Lynch and his wife, Ann moved to South Africa from Ireland in 1971. That year, he joined Imperial, which was then a car dealership losing $12,345 (€9,769) a year. Two years later, Mr Lynch acquired a 10% stake in the company, before leading a diversification into truck hire, logistics, car rental and — through the acquisition of Thyssen-Krupp in the late 1990s — aviation leasing.
He still has family here. “My brother still runs the family farm in Kerry and, although I do get back a lot and keep in touch with family, I’ve unfortunately lost a lot of the culture I was born into,” he said.
Chairman of the nine-member independent judging panel, Sunil Bharti Mittal — founder of Bharti Enterprises and 2004 India Entrepreneur Of The Year, said: “Bill is the epitome of an entrepreneur — he started with nothing, but he grew an amazing business over 30 years.”
