Alan Sugar
Alan Michael Sugar, Baron Sugar is a British business magnate, media personality, author, politician, and political adviser.
Sugar began what would later become his largest business venture, consumer electronics company Amstrad, in 1968. In 2007, he sold his remaining interest in the company in a deal to BSkyB for £125 million. He was also the chairman and part-owner of Tottenham Hotspur Football Club from 1991 to 2001, selling his remaining stake in the club in 2007 as well, for £25 million. He is the host and "Boss" of the BBC Television reality competition series The Apprentice, which has been broadcast every year, with the exception of 2020 and 2021, since 2005. He also assumed the role for The Celebrity Apprentice Australia for Australia's Nine Network in 2021 and 2022.
Sugar was elevated to the House of Lords in 2009 as a Labour peer and was one of the party's biggest donors, but left the party in 2015 and subsequently expressed support for the Conservative Party. According to the Sunday Times Rich List, Sugar became a billionaire in 2015. In 2021, his fortune was estimated at £1.21bn, ranking him as the 138th-richest person in the UK.
Early life
Alan Michael Sugar was born on 24 March 1947 in Hackney, East London, into a Jewish family. His father, Nathan, was a tailor in the garment industry of the East End. His maternal grandparents were born in Russia, and his paternal grandfather was born in Poland. Sugar's paternal grandmother, Sarah Sugar, was born in London to Polish parents.When Sugar was young, his family lived in a council flat. Because of his profuse, curly hair, he was nicknamed "Mop head", a name that he still goes by in the present day. He attended Northwold Primary School and then Brooke House Secondary School in Upper Clapton, Hackney, and made extra money by working at a greengrocers. After leaving school at the age of 16, he worked briefly for the civil service as a statistician at the Ministry of Education.
Amstrad
In 1968, aged 21, Sugar set up Amstrad with £100 of Post Office savings. He started off selling radio aerials for cars and other electrical goods out of a van which he had bought for £50 and insured for £8.File:Amstrad CPC464.jpg|left|thumb|250px|Amstrad's CPC 464 personal computer
The name of the company was formed from his initials and the first four letters of the word 'trading': Alan Michael Sugar Trading. It began as a general importer/exporter and wholesale; by 1970 the first manufacturing venture was underway. He achieved lower production prices by using injection moulding plastics for hi-fi turntable covers, severely undercutting competitors who used vacuum-forming processes. In the mid 1970s manufacturing capacity was expanded to include the production of audio amplifiers, stereo cassette recording decks and AM/FM radio tuners, on most cases beating the competition on price.
In 1980, Amstrad was listed on the London Stock Exchange and during the 1980s Amstrad doubled its profit and market value every year. By 1984, recognising the opportunity of the home computer era, Amstrad launched an 8-bit machine, the Amstrad CPC 464. Although the CPC range were attractive machines, with CP/M-capability and a good BASIC interpreter, it had to compete with its arch-rivals, the more graphically complex Commodore 64 and the popular Sinclair ZX Spectrum, not to mention the highly sophisticated BBC Micro. Despite this, three million units were sold worldwide with a long production life of eight years. It inspired an East German version with Z80 clone processors. In 1985, Sugar had another major breakthrough with the launch of the Amstrad PCW 8256 word processor which retailed at over £300, but was still considerably cheaper than rival machines. In 1986, Amstrad bought the rights to the Sinclair computer product line and produced two more ZX Spectrum models in a similar style to their CPC machines. It also developed the PC1512, a PC compatible computer, which became quite popular in Europe and was the first in a line of Amstrad PCs.
In 1988, Stewart Alsop II called Sugar and Jack Tramiel "the world's two leading business-as-war entrepreneurs". The 1990s proved a difficult time for the company. The launch of a range of business PCs was marred by unreliable hard disks, causing high levels of customer dissatisfaction and damaging Amstrad's reputation in the personal computer market, from which it never recovered. Subsequently, Seagate was ordered to pay Amstrad $153 million in damages for lost revenue. This was later reduced by $22 million in an out of court settlement. In the early 1990s, Amstrad began to focus on portable computers rather than desktop computers. Also, in 1990, Amstrad entered the gaming market with the Amstrad GX4000, but it was a commercial failure, largely because there was only a poor selection of games available. Additionally, it was immediately superseded by the Japanese consoles: Mega Drive and Super NES, which both had a much more comprehensive selection of games. In 1993, Amstrad released the PenPad, a PDA, and bought into Betacom and Viglen in order to focus more on telecommunications rather than computers. Amstrad released the first of its combined telephony and e-mail devices, called the e-m@iler, followed by the e-m@ilerplus in 2002, neither of which sold in great volume.
On 31 July 2007, it was announced that broadcaster BSkyB had agreed to buy Amstrad for about £125m. At the time of the takeover, Sugar commented that he wished to play a part in the business, saying: "I turn 60 this year and I have had 40 years of hustling in the business, but now I have to start thinking about my team of loyal staff, many of whom have been with me for many years." On 2 July 2008 it was announced that Sugar was standing down from Amstrad as chairman, to focus on his other business interests.
Tottenham Hotspur
After a take-over battle with Robert Maxwell for ownership of Tottenham Hotspur, Sugar teamed up with the club's manager Terry Venables and bought it in June 1991. Although his initial investment helped ease the financial troubles the club was suffering at the time, his treatment of Tottenham as a business venture and not a footballing one made him an unpopular figure among the club's fans. In Sugar's nine years as chairman, Tottenham Hotspur did not finish in the top six in the league and won just one trophy, the 1999 League Cup.After being sacked as the club's chief executive by Sugar in 1993, Venables appealed to the high courts for reinstatement. A legal battle for the club took place over the summer, which Sugar won. The decision to sack Venables angered many Tottenham fans, and Sugar later said, "I felt as though I'd killed Bambi."
In 1992, Sugar was the only representative of the then "big five" who voted in favour of Sky's bid for Premier League television rights. The other four voted in favour of ITV's bid, as it had promised to show big five games more often. At the time of the vote, Sugar's company Amstrad was developing satellite dishes for Sky, though Sugar had declared this prior to the vote. During negotiations, Sugar called Sky CEO Sam Chisholm and angrily ordered him to "blow out of the water" with a much higher bid.
In 1994, Sugar financed the transfers of three players of the 1994 FIFA World Cup: Ilie Dumitrescu, Gica Popescu, and Jürgen Klinsmann, who in his first season in English football, was named FWA Footballer of the Year. Because Spurs had not qualified for European competition, Klinsmann decided to invoke an opt-out clause in his contract and left for Bayern Munich in the summer of 1995. Sugar appeared on television holding the last shirt Klinsmann wore for Spurs and said he would "not wash his car with it". He referred to foreigners coming into the Premier League at high wages as "Carlos Kickaballs". Klinsmann retaliated by calling Sugar "a man without honour", and said:
Klinsmann re-signed for Tottenham on loan in December 1997.
In October 1998, former Tottenham striker Teddy Sheringham released his autobiography, in which he cited Sugar as the reason he left the club in 1997. He said that Sugar had accused him of feigning injury during a long spell on the sidelines during the 1993–94 season. He further stated that Sugar had refused to give him the five-year contract he wanted, as he had not believed Sheringham would still get into the Tottenham team when he was 36. Sheringham returned to Tottenham after his spell at Manchester United and continued to start for the first team until he was released in the summer of 2003, at age 37. Sheringham said that Sugar "lacked ambition" and was hypocritical. As an example, Sugar asked him for recommendations of players; when Sheringham suggested England midfielder Paul Ince, Sugar refused because he did not want to spend £4 million on a player who would soon be 30. After Sheringham left Spurs, Sugar approved the signing of Les Ferdinand, aged 31, for a club record £6 million, on higher wages than Sheringham had wanted.
Sugar appointed seven managers in his time at Spurs. The first was Peter Shreeves, who replaced Venables in 1991, followed by the dual management team of Doug Livermore and Ray Clemence in 1992, former Spurs midfielder Osvaldo Ardiles in 1993, and Gerry Francis in 1994. In 1997, Sugar surprised the footballing world by appointing the relatively unknown Swiss manager Christian Gross. Gross lasted nine months as Spurs finished in 14th place in 1998, and began the next season with just three points from their opening three games. Sugar next appointed George Graham, a former player and manager of bitter rivals Arsenal. Although Graham won Spurs' first trophy in eight years, fans never warmed to him, partly because of his Arsenal connection, and disliked the negative, defensive style of football which he had Spurs playing; fans believed it was not the "Tottenham way".
In February 2001, after speculation and confirmation on 11 December 2000, Sugar sold his majority stake at Tottenham to leisure group ENIC, selling 27% of the club for £22 million. In June 2007, he sold his 12% remaining shares to ENIC for £25 million, ending his 16-year association with the club. He described his time at Tottenham as "a waste of my life". Sugar later donated £3 million from the proceeds of the sale of his interests in Tottenham Hotspur to the refurbishment of the Hackney Empire in his native East End of London.