Nicolas Hayek

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Nicolas Hayek (1992)

Nicolas George Hayek (born February 19, 1928 in Beirut , Lebanon , † June 28, 2010 in Biel / Bienne ) was a Swiss entrepreneur. He was founder as well as President and Delegate of the Board of Directors of the Swatch Group .

family

Hayek grew up in Beirut largely in the care of his Lebanese mother, Linda Hayek, née Tamer. His father, George Nicolas Hayek, worked as a dental surgeon and was a Lebanese-US citizen. His family belonged to the Greek Orthodox upper class in Lebanon. The family moved to Switzerland in 1949 .

In Switzerland he married Marianne Mezger in 1951, who comes from an industrial family and who had worked as an au pair for his Lebanese family. In 1964, after five years of marriage, Hayek became a Swiss citizen, entitled to live in Meisterschwanden , where he also lived with his family.

Their son Nick Hayek is President of the Executive Committee and their daughter Nayla Hayek was elected President of the Board of Directors of the Swatch Group after the death of her father .

Hayek died on June 28, 2010 at the age of 82 of heart failure in his company in Biel . The funeral took place in close family circle. More than a thousand people said goodbye at the public commemoration in Bern's Kursaal.

education

Hayek first attended the French Jesuit school and then the high school. He studied mathematics , physics and chemistry .

Profession and self-employment

Hayek's actual professional career began in 1950: he worked in the mathematics department of a Swiss reinsurance company, and from 1951 took on various positions in industry, where he gained his first management experience, especially in the mechanical engineering company of his father-in-law Eduard Mezger. He ran this company for some time because his father-in-law was absent due to illness. The unconventionally appearing Hayek soon vacated this post and looked for a job that offered him the opportunity to “learn something new every day” and to make better use of his experience and the network of relationships he had built up.

Hayek engineering

In 1957 he founded a management consultancy in Zurich with a loan of CHF 4,000. Industrial orders from large German corporations followed. In 1963 he registered his company “Hayek Engineering” in the Swiss commercial register. By 1979, Hayek had succeeded in gaining more than 300 major customers from more than 30 countries, and he was particularly successful with his management credo: "The rarest resource we have are entrepreneurs in top management."

Hayek Engineering has around 150 employees (as of 2009). In addition to the headquarters of Hayek Engineering AG in Zurich, there were branches in Germany and France until they were closed: Hayek Engineering (Deutschland) GmbH in Eschborn and Hayek France SA in Paris .

Swatch Group

The Swatch Group's Nicolas G. Hayek Center office and commercial building in Tokyo's Ginza business district

Nicolas G. Hayek was co-founder and from 1986 Chairman and Delegate of the Board of Directors of the Swatch Group , based in Biel.

From 1980 Hayek worked as a strategic consultant for the watch company SSIH (Société Suisse pour l'Industrie Horlogère) and from 1982 also for the most important Swiss watch components and movement manufacturer ASUAG . Like almost the entire Swiss and also the international traditional watch industry, they got into massive economic difficulties due to the extraordinarily strong depreciation of the US dollar against the European currencies and due to the quartz crisis that resulted from the market success of the quartz watch . He recommended the merger of the two companies, laid down the guidelines and developed the future corporate strategy. When the merger was completed in 1983, he also contributed financially. The result was the new company SMH (Société de Microélectronique et d'Horlogerie / Swiss Society for Microelectronics and Watchmaking), which was renamed The Swatch Group AG in 1998 .

With great self-confidence, Hayek began to implement the concept of the electronic quality watch, which was revolutionary for Switzerland, and the Swatch brand, which was launched in 1983 . The secret of the success of Swatch watches was that their components were reduced from 151 individual parts for conventional quartz watches to 51 standardized parts, the mechanism was welded into an injection-molded plastic body and a sales price of 80 to 100 Swiss francs was targeted. In 1981 the first watches were presented, the brand name of which had finally mutated from Second Watch , Swiss Watch , S-Watch to Swatch . These were initially marketed in the USA. New collections created by artists were always launched. In 1984, 800,000 copies had already been sold.

Hayek consistently continued on his entrepreneurial path. He placed luxury watch brands such as Tissot , Blancpain , Omega , Longines , Rado , Certina , Hamilton , but also cheap products such as the Flik Flak children's watch on the market. In 1994 the share of Swiss watches in the world market was 53 percent.

Smart

One of Hayek's favorite projects was the concept of the smart car (Swatch-Mobil), a micro-compact vehicle with an environmentally friendly electric drive or hybrid drive . The concept was initially developed with VW and from 1994 in cooperation with Daimler-Benz . Until the beginning of 1994, only two design studies had been carried out. The vehicle was then presented to the public for the first time in 1997 - but without an electric or hybrid drive. Helmut Kohl gave the opening speech at the start of production in Hambach (Lorraine) . As a result, Hayek left the project because it no longer met his original ideas. On November 1, 1998, he sold his shares in Mercedes , which produce and sell the vehicle as Smart Fortwo .

Belenos Clean Power

Hayek was committed to the development of sustainable energy generation and energy use technologies. To this end, he founded Belenos Clean Power in 2007 , which, together with the Paul Scherrer Institute (PSI), is promoting research into cars with alternative drives.

Society and politics

Leopard tank

In 1984 the Swiss National Council's military commission considered buying German Leopard tanks . The Swiss arms industry and its representatives in politics propagated self-construction. As an expert called in, Hayek found that building under license in Switzerland would have been 300–400 percent more expensive than buying from a German manufacturer. Initially slandered as a “traitor to the fatherland”, Hayek was finally right and was named Entrepreneur of the Year by the press.

ETH Zurich

In 1985 Hayek helped to realign ETH Zurich and to end the staff freeze that the federal government had imposed on the two federally owned Swiss universities, ETH Zurich and ETH Lausanne (EPFL) in the mid-1970s . In doing so, he had “broken a taboo” - “ETH must develop completely free of influences,” he said.

Rütlifeier

In 2007, Hayek, together with Johann Schneider-Ammann and others, took over the security costs of the Rütlifeier (around CHF 100,000–200,000), “out of concern for Switzerland's reputation abroad”. The donors had thus overcome the concerns of the public administration and “saved the Rütlifeier”.

Swiss big banks

In September 2009, at a press conference in Bern, Hayek, together with politicians Christoph Blocher ( SVP ) and Christian Levrat ( SP ), who had accepted his invitation , demanded that major Swiss banks such as UBS and Credit Suisse should no longer be so big that the State cannot let it fail (“ Too Big to Fail ”). State rules should therefore "clasp the wings" of the banks. Together they fought against the fact that things would go on after the crisis as they did before.

Awards

In 1995 Federal Chancellor Helmut Kohl appointed him to the “Council for Research, Technology and Science”. He was also appointed President of the Innovation Council for France by French President Chirac in 1996.

Fonts

  • Nicolas G. Hayek, Josef F. Kümin (editor); Freedom & Responsibility Foundation (Ed.): Freedom, Responsibility and Switzerland's Accession to the EU. Speech on the occasion of the “Head of Missions Lunch Meeting” by Boris Lazar, Ambassador of the Czech Republic, on March 16, 2009 in the Kursaal Bern. In: Freedom & Responsibility series. Volume 4, Society and Church Where to? Membership letter No. 233, Lachen SZ / Freedom & Responsibility Foundation, Kriens LU 2009 ( archive.org/swatchgroup.com ).

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c For the family background, see J. Wegelin: Mister Swatch or preprint in the SonntagsZeitung on 23 August 2009.
  2. ↑ On the family in Lebanon see Nicolas G. Hayek in conversation with Friedemann Bartu , p. 25
  3. ↑ SF 1 : Great commemoration for Nicolas Hayek in Bern Article with video from July 3, 2010
  4. ↑ "Iron foundry Ed. Mezger AG ”in Kallnach , mezgergroup.com
  5. ↑ On founding the company, see Nicolas G. Hayek in conversation with Friedemann Bartu , page 14f. and 22.
  6. ↑ a b About Us on the Hayek Engineering AG website
  7. ^ Hayek Engineering (Germany) GmbH, Eschborn. Retrieved June 11, 2020 .
  8. ↑ HAYEK FRANCE SAS (PARIS 8) Chiffre d'affaires, résultat, bilans sur SOCIETE.COM - 387566904. Accessed June 11, 2020 .
  9. ^ Société Suisse pour l'Industrie Horlogère
  10. ^ Profile of Nicolas G. Hayek on the Swatch Group website
  11. ↑ Triumph of a tinkerer . In: Der Spiegel . No. 13 , 1994 ( online - for Hotzenblitz with mention of two design studies by Hayek).
  12. ↑ Helmut Kohl - document overview. Retrieved September 1, 2019 .
  13. ^ Nicolas G. Hayek in conversation with Friedemann Bartu , see literature
  14. ↑ ETHistory: University - a company?
  15. ↑ ETHistory: Nicolas G. Hayek
  16. ↑ Entrepreneurs sponsor the Rütlifeier - Lucerne is available again as a departure point ( memento from October 7, 2007 in the Internet Archive ) NZZ article from June 22, 2007
  17. ↑ Rütli celebration sold out - around two thirds of the tickets went to women articles in the NZZ from June 22, 2007
  18. ↑ Colorful alliance for smaller big banks - The Blocher / Levrat / Hayek trio supports the National Bank Article of the NZZ from September 12, 2009
  19. ↑ Illustres Trio against the big banks - Blocher, Levrat and Hayek warn of the cluster risk , article in the NZZ of September 11, 2009
  20. ↑ Nicolas Hayek - WHO'S WHO biography. Retrieved September 1, 2019 .
  21. ↑ a b c Entry in the Historical Lexicon of Switzerland, see under web links
  22. ↑ List of all decorations awarded by the Federal President for services to the Republic of Austria from 1952 (PDF; 6.9 MB)
  23. ↑ Honorary Citizenship Celebration : The City of Biel presents NG Hayek with its Honorary Citizenship Certificate at the Swatch Group Archives
  24. ↑ On the honors see Nicolas G. Hayek in conversation with Friedemann Bartu , page 47f. and 174ff.
  25. ↑ Honorary Citizens Nicolas and Marianne Hayek News - Meisti Zytig Issue No. 11 on the website of the Meisterschwanden community
  26. ↑ Press release  ( page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. (PDF) of the Musée international d'horlogerie@1@ 2Template: Dead Link / www.chaux-de-fonds.ch  
  27. ↑ Nicolas G. Hayek Commandeur de l'ordre des Arts et des Lettres (in French) Swatch Group press release of June 23, 2009
personal data
SURNAME Hayek, Nicolas
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Hayek, Nicolas George
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Swiss entrepreneur
DATE OF BIRTH February 19, 1928
PLACE OF BIRTH Beirut
DATE OF DEATH June 28, 2010
Place of death Biel