The success story of Valentin Pavlovich Gapontsev is almost unbelievable. He became an entrepreneur at the age of 51, and built his business not on the sale of gas, oil or metals, but on the production of industrial lasers and the implementation of his own patents. About the life and achievements of this extraordinary person - our article.
Biography
Valentin Pavlovich Gapontsev was born on February 23, 1939 in Moscow. However, his childhood and youth passed in Ukrainian Lviv. There he graduated from high school and the Polytechnic Institute. In 1961, he got a job at the Lviv Design Bureau of the Ministry of Radio Industry. He was an engineer, participated in the development of telemetry and radio-electronic systems of the lunar cabin for Soviet cosmonauts. Such activity seemed to Valentin Pavlovich as routine and routine, and in 1964 he went to Moscow. He entered the graduate school of the Physicotechnical Institute with a degree in laser physics. In 1967, a young graduate student got a job as a junior research fellow at the Institute of Radio Engineering and Electronics of the USSR Academy of Sciences. Here he subsequently worked for more than thirty-five years, became the head of the laboratory and a world-famous scientist.
In the process, Gapontsev became disillusioned with the Academy of Sciences. According to him, it has turned into an unproductive institution with a bloated staff, implementing imaginary super projects. It was this disappointment that led the scientist to business.
Entrepreneurial vein
Valentin Pavlovich Gapontsevās businessmanās talent manifested itself even at the time when he worked as a junior research assistant. The physicist understood that foreign scientists are conducting more experiments because they do not spend years assembling laboratory facilities manually, but use modern equipment. Gapontsev was able to convince the management to allocate money for technical equipment and began to make purchases at international exhibitions. In total, he bought equipment for various laboratories in the amount of fifteen million dollars. In parallel, he developed his own laboratory, in which by 1985 he had accumulated eight thousand tested samples.
First steps in business
When socialism collapsed in 1990, Valentin Pavlovich decided, together with several students, to create a small NTO "IRE-Polyus" producing fiber lasers. The stake was made on such lasers, since they are more economical and compact than gas and crystalline ones, have a longer service life, and do not require expensive tuning and adjustment. The path from the idea to the introduction of such developments in the USSR could take up to ten years, and Gapontsev managed in a matter of months. Fiber lasers with a power of more than 10 watts and designed for use in the fiber optic telecommunications industry, which is rapidly gaining momentum, were created at IRE-Polyus. However, in the 1990s. nobody was interested in high-tech devices in Russia. And Valentin Pavlovich Gapontsev went to Germany.
Technology is not for Russia
Abroad, a scientist at the age of fifty-three years first got behind the wheel of a car: it was more convenient to look for orders. Thanks to old scientific ties, the newly made businessman went to the Italian telecommunications company Italtel, which became interested in its technology and wanted to buy it. Valentin Pavlovich refused to sell prospective development, but agreed to supply equipment for its implementation. The order amount was $ 750,000. The Italians put forward the condition that the equipment must be manufactured in Europe. Then in German Burbach Gapontsev founded the production company IPG Laser GmbH. It operates to this day and today employs about five hundred people.
On top of success
For 1995-2000 IPG Laser GmbH and IRE-Polyus jointly developed and launched over two hundred laser devices on the world market, many of which still have no analogues. IPG Laser GmbH has become an internationally renowned innovation center. In 1997, Valentin Pavlovich opened a similar company IPG Fibertech Srl in Milan, and in 1998 - IPG Photonics Corporation in Oxford. The latter was the headquarters of the entire project. Subsidiaries are also available in Russia, Japan, India and Korea.
Gapontsev does not take government orders and grants, and is engaged exclusively in commercial activities. In many states, such developments are funded by national programs. In the arsenal of Valentin Pavlovich there were no large financial and human resources, but this did not prevent him from being ahead of all competitors.
The Conquest of America
In the US market, the new company quickly attracted the attention of external investors and received the capital necessary for industrial production. Large investment banks and firms such as Merrill Lynch, Robertson Stephens, and TA Associates invested in it.
Nevertheless, it was not easy for Valentin Pavlovich Gapontsev to conquer a new market. In 2000, he had a conflict with JDSU, a large American company manufacturing reliable laser diodes. IPG Photonics signed a contract with her for the purchase of devices in the amount of $ 70 million. But because of the crisis that struck the market for technology companies, Gapontsev could not fulfill his obligations. JDSU filed a lawsuit and claimed compensation of $ 35 million, while the annual revenue of IPG Photonics at that time was 22 million. The lawsuit lasted three years, and in the end, Valentin Pavlovich was able to significantly reduce the amount of the claim and avoid bankruptcy. From this story, the businessman concluded that you need to produce everything yourself, so as not to depend on anyone. He sold part of the company's shares to private investors and, with the money raised, launched his own production of laser diodes.
Currently
Now Gapontsevās enterprises provide for themselves 95 percent. The main production sites are located in Germany, the USA and the Russian science city Fryazino. The scientist is less and less engaged in operational management, now his function is to solve strategic problems and control new scientific developments.
Valentin Pavlovich not only conducts entrepreneurial activity, but also heads the departments at the Worcester Polytechnic Institute and MIPT. He says that he prefers to educate students from scratch rather than retrain under his own standards already formed specialists in the field of laser physics. The entrepreneur teaches wards the ability to work in a team and concentrate on the task. The most promising guys are invited to their business.
Scientific achievements
Valentin Pavlovich Gapontsev independently developed the concept of creating quantum optical generators, which were based on a fundamentally new technological platform. Based on this concept, he opened his own company in the 1990s. Already the first scientific results have confirmed the effectiveness of the system and the reliability of the implemented high-tech devices.
The scientist was directly involved in the creation of high-power fiber amplifiers and lasers, the development and production of fixed fiber-optic communication systems in Russia, the introduction of high-performance phosphate laser glasses in mass production. Today, there are more than five hundred monographs, scientific publications and patents in the field of laser materials in the piggy bank of Valentin Pavlovich. He is a recognized winner of the US Optical Society and winner of the "Best Entrepreneur of England" award.
Despite the achievements, in the homeland the scientific activities of Gapontsev were appreciated quite late. Only in 2010, when the businessmanās fortune was already estimated in billions, and his companies became world market leaders, Valentin Pavlovich was awarded the State Prize of the Russian Federation. In the same year, RUSNANO bought part of the shares of its production center in Fryazino, which was subsequently visited by V. Putin and D. Medvedev.
At the fiftieth anniversary of the creation of the laser, the name of the scientist was named on the SPIE list, which included 28 outstanding world experts in the field of laser technology and physics.
condition
According to Forbes magazine, Valentin Pavlovich Gapontsev is one of the richest people in Russia. He currently controls 35 percent of IPG Photonics, which has a capitalization of $ 3.5 billion.
In 2013, the businessmanās fortune was estimated at $ 1.3 billion. In the ranking of Russian oligarchs, he took 81 place, and in the world list of billionaires he was based on the 1107th line. In 2017, Gapontsevās fortune grew to 1.6 billion, and he climbed to 53rd place in the ranking of Russia's richest entrepreneurs.
Personal life
A 79-year-old dual-citizenship laser scientist now lives with his wife in the American city of Worcester, Massachusetts. Valentin Pavlovich Gapontsev prefers not to talk about his family. The fact is that he has a difficult relationship with his son. Denis Gapontsev followed in his father's footsteps, graduated from Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology in 1999, and then went to the United States to help Valentin Pavlovich in business. For eight years, he has been President of Development at IPG Photonics. Then the views of father and son diverged, and Denis returned to Russia, where he engaged in real estate activities. Over the past ten years, Valentin Pavlovich and Denis can not find a common language and almost do not see each other.
Gapontsev Sr. notes with sadness that he cannot yet find a successor to whom he could pass on his brainchild. He dreams that his business created from scratch should not be absorbed, but develop even when the scientist is no longer there.
Valentin Pavlovich Gapontsev is a unique person. In the conditions of the collapse of socialism and the crisis in the market of technology companies, he was able not only to develop and maintain entrepreneurial activity, but created a fundamentally new production base, independently developed a number of the latest technologies and significantly expanded the range of their use. His small engineering company, originally from the Soviet Union, has grown into a large corporation that controls 80 percent of the world's high-power fiber lasers.