What You See Is What You Get: My Autobiography (25 page)

I'd just fallen back to sleep when the phone rang again, about thirty minutes later. It was Ann, who exclaimed, 'We've had a girl!'

'I know,' I said. 'You told me that half an hour ago.'

'Did I?' she said. 'I don't remember.'

She must have been pumped up with some drug. When I got to the hospital in the morning, she said to me, 'We have a girl.'

'I know! You've told me three times now.'

We named our daughter Louise Jane, Louise after Ann's cousin Louie who, with his wife Edna, had lived next door to Rita and Johnnie. Sadly, Louie had recently died from a rare heart condition.

Ann and I were delighted to have a baby girl, as was Rita. To Edna, Louise was her special niece in the years to come, for obvious reasons. And Daphne was so happy, as she loved baby girls. So, all in all, Miss Louise Jane Sugar had a lot of love coming her way from all directions.

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It's all very well selling items from PS5.99 to PS19.99 retail, but at the end of the day you need to sell loads to make real money. It's very simple. Say I made
25 per cent on those products - after the dealer's margin and VAT, I'd be lucky if the net amount in my bin was PS1 for an item retailing at PS5. Sell a product for PS50 and you get PS12 in your bin. This realisation was to become another of my philosophies that would lead me to fortune in the future. I needed to concentrate on high-ticket, high-margin items.

A booming product at the time was the hi-fi cassette deck, a piece of equipment which enabled people to play cassettes through their hi-fi system and make recordings. The Japanese had cornered the market on these. I noticed an advert in the
JEA
magazine for a cassette deck by the company Orion and contacted them, only to be told they were already selling the item to an importer in England. I tracked down the importer and found that he was a real small-time Charlie - a nice chap of foreign origin. I explained my interest in buying these cassette decks, but also made clear that it wouldn't be practical to buy from him - there was no room for two margins.

Amazingly, he agreed to put me in touch with his equivalent of Shomei Trading - Waco Trading in Japan. He made arrangements for me to buy these cassette decks from the manufacturer, Orion, via Waco. In return for this, a commission would be paid to him on all my purchases.

Waco Trading Company was run by Walter Colson, a man of German-Jewish origin who had escaped Nazi Germany in the war and set up a trading company in Japan. We started to import these cassette decks from Waco Trading with our brand on them and they were a phenomenal success; once again I managed to undercut the market and the units really complemented my range of amplifiers.

Because I was importing more and more products and components, I felt it was about time for me to go and visit the Far East. But prior to me telling you about my first trip to Japan, I need to share with you an amazing story which made me a load of money.

One day, sitting in my office in Ridley Road, I got a call from a gentleman from the United Africa Company who'd seen our advertisements in all the hi-fi magazines. In a rather posh City accent, he told me that he had been contacted by his principals in Nigeria - Kingsway Stores - who wanted to buy some of our equipment.

I knew the word Nigeria meant
beware.
There were lots of scams going on there, so I was very frosty to this man on the phone. Nevertheless, he insisted on coming to visit me at Ridley Road. During his visit, I told him I would be concerned about shipping any goods to Nigeria, as Nigerian companies were notorious for not paying. I didn't want to waste his time, so I told him there was no chance of me dealing with him, even if he were going to
propose issuing me a letter of credit drawn on a Nigerian bank, which was about as useless as a second-hand Kleenex.

He responded that the United Africa Company actually
owned
Kingsway Stores in Nigeria, and if they decided to do any business with us, he would pay us for the goods in England. My ears pricked up at that, and I took him through our range of products and gave him prices. He said he would go away and consider it.

A day later, he called and informed me that he was going to give me an 'indent'.

'What's an indent?' said I, wondering if he was going to whack me with a hammer.

An order, Mr Sugar,' he said.

I was poised with pen in hand, ready to take down this massive order. He announced that he wanted two pairs of each of the speakers we produced, two of each of the amplifiers we produced and two tuners. On top of this, they would need to be packed in wooden crates, no straw (in case of fire), with special markings, etc., etc.

I put down my pen. Rather than be rude to him, I just said, 'Yeah, okay but in the back of my mind I thought, 'What a waste of time that was,' and just ignored the whole thing.

A week or so went by and I got a call from the chap asking me what was happening about his indent. I told him, quite frankly, that it was too small, that we didn't deal in ones and twos.

He explained that these were merely
samples
he needed to send to Nigeria by air for them to give their final okay on a bigger order. He convinced me to send the samples to my forwarding agent, assuring me that the United Africa Company would pay for all the special crating of the goods. He said that payment would come shortly, as indeed it did, the next day.

A couple of weeks went by and I was contacted by this fellow again.

'Right, we're ready to give you a big order.'

If I remember rightly, it was for 500 amplifiers and 500 pairs of speakers - and here's the bit that's incredible. He wanted them delivered in the next three weeks to Gatwick, where the whole lot would be sent by highly expensive airfreight to Nigeria. Can you believe that?!

To put it into perspective, in those days to airfreight a box the size of a suitcase would have cost about PS100 and this order would have filled at least one forty-foot lorry. They had chartered a big freight jet!

My streetwise upbringing kicked into play. Where was the sting? Was it: 'Be nice and polite, send the money for the samples on time and then, when
you get the five hundred units, don't pay'? I pleaded poverty and told him that to produce such an order, we would need the finance for it.

He replied, 'No problem at all - we will send you the money tomorrow.'

In those days, there was no telegraphic transfer system. There
were
ways of transferring money from bank to bank, but it never happened instantaneously - sometimes it took a few days. This all seemed too good to be true. I wasn't going to ship one thing for this fellow until I had the cash.

Sure enough, in the next morning's post came a massive cheque from the United Africa Company. I called my bank manager at Lloyds in Islington and asked him whether he'd ever heard of this company. It shows you how cocooned I was in my narrow-minded way - it turned out that this was a massive organisation which had been trading in Africa for many years and had many African assets. The bank manager said that he'd look at the cheque and if it was authentic, he'd give me an assurance to go ahead. I sent my dad straight up there with the cheque. The manager phoned me back saying it was okay.

Bloody hell! I'd hit the jackpot!

It was time to get back on the phone to this fellow and do a bit of schmoozing. It transpired that the Nigerian government, for reasons best known to themselves, had declared a bonus of the equivalent of PS200 to all civil servants. These civil servants were taking their windfalls along to Kingsway Stores to buy up anything that was considered luxury goods, including hi-fis. It was clear that this fellow was no expert in electrical goods; he had merely been given the job of filling Kingsway Stores with hi-fis, fast. What also occurred to me was that everybody else he'd contacted in the UK must have given him the cold shoulder. His other ports of call would have been people like Philips, Sony and the Rank Organisation, companies where he could never have got an audience with the boss. He would have had to go through layers of management, by which time he would have been too late, whereas I was on to it like a flash. But let's not forget that Amstrad was a known brand in hi-fi and the Nigerians did read the UK hi-fi magazines.

I saw the potential straightaway and asked this fellow if there was anything else that he might require, as I was off to Japan shortly. He asked me if we could get a supply of portable radio cassettes with shortwave radio. I mentioned that even though portable radio cassettes, tape recorders, etc. were not part of Amstrad's line-up, I was sure I could source some and fulfil his needs, though I didn't really expect anything to come of it.

Back to my Japanese trip. I hadn't travelled overseas much before; the furthest I'd flown was to Majorca and Italy. So going to Japan was to be an
adventure. I decided to take Ann along and her mum and dad offered to look after the kids.

As I was making real money by now, I bought first-class tickets. So there I was, twenty-eight years old, sitting in first class with my twenty-seven-year-old wife, getting some rather strange looks from other more mature and worldly passengers. I think people thought we were from some pop band - how else could people who looked like us afford to travel this way?

It was an exciting adventure. In those days, the plane had to stop to refuel in Anchorage, Alaska - there were no non-stop flights from London to Tokyo. The duty-free area in Anchorage was like a little town, full of shops selling everything from cosmetics to cameras. One thing that sticks in my mind was a giant polar bear in a glass display cabinet in the departure lounge. It was a real, stuffed polar bear, and all the Japanese people surrounded the display, taking photos.

A strange thing happened to me when we got to Tokyo. As the plane touched down in what was unknown territory, a wave of insecurity came over me. Here I was, thousands of miles away from home, in a strange place with a strange culture.

I'd told Waco Trading that I was coming and they had booked us into the Okura Hotel in Tokyo, opposite the American embassy. Mr Imai met us at the airport. As we came through customs, I saw him, a thin little grey-haired man with glasses. If ever there was a stereotypical image of a Japanese man, he was it. He was standing there, diligently holding a sign with my name on it. As I approached him, I said, 'It's me - Mr Sugar.'

His immediate reply was, 'Where is your father? Are you Alan Sugar?'

I said, 'Yes, I am Alan Sugar.'

He was stunned that the person he'd been communicating with all this time was this young fellow with long hair and a leather coat. I introduced him to Ann, but he was still in a state of shock. In Japan in those days it was virtually unknown for young people to be in business. My visit there was to be full of surprises for the people I'd meet.

Mr Imai drove us from the airport to the Okura Hotel. For the first time in our lives, we experienced jet-lag. We were shattered and went to bed soon after we arrived, at about nine o'clock at night, only to wake up three hours later thinking we'd slept through the night. I stuck the telly on and tried to watch an Elvis Presley film with his voice dubbed in Japanese. Really funny.

The next morning, Mr Imai took us to his office - just one room on the third floor of a small office block. I was astonished to see this company working out of one room - I guess I'd had visions of Shomei Trading being some
massive organisation. In a way, it was comforting - here was a very small company with a hunger to do business and a boss in control of his costs.

Mr Imai introduced me to his three members of staff. He went on to explain that everyone there thought that the man who'd previously come to see them - Peter Jones - was the boss. He'd told them
he
was in charge. I explained that Jones had left and he was never the boss. They didn't understand and, to be honest, I didn't have the will to explain it, other than to reiterate that
I
was the boss.

It transpired that Jones had slung his weight about and was taken to the finest restaurants in Tokyo. Obviously he'd gotten himself into a situation where he felt he
had
to place an order. I wouldn't have minded, but he didn't even know what a bloody toggle switch was.

Ann was sitting beside me wondering what she was doing there. She was aware, of course, that I was in the business of hi-fi and electrical stuff, but never knew any of the details. I have to say, in my defence, that I never prevented her from getting involved - she simply wasn't interested. In fact, she hadn't even been to any of my business premises.

She must have been bored out of her mind listening to all this nonsense. At least in the afternoon Mr Imai took us to the centre of Tokyo, to see some of the big department stores and a place called Akihabara. Akihabara was my Disney World - a street of giant shops, seven or eight storeys high, with elevators taking you to different departments, as well as a bazaar-style market where you walked through passageways lined with stalls selling every electrical gadget you could think of. I was in heaven collecting brochures and taking pictures. Akihabara provided loads of food for thought and was to be my hunting ground for years to come.

Mr Imai's first name was something like Akira. I found it hard to remember, let alone pronounce, so as we warmed to each other, I asked him if he minded me calling him Harry. He was delighted, as if it were some kind of compliment. In fact, I was to go on to discover that a lot of Oriental people I dealt with in later years had given themselves Western-style first names to make their customers feel at home, particularly American customers. Harry told me that that he would call me Sugar-san, a term of endearment and respect in Japanese culture.