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Heinz Nixdorf, 47, has built Germany's most successful computer manufacturing company. The firm, Nixdorf-Computer, of which he is founder, sole owner and chief executive, has been competing head to head with IBM, Machines Bull (now Honeywell), Philips, Burroughs and Univac. Nixdorfs firm is the only European-based company that has consistently earned a profit from computers throughout the past two decades. Lately, the directors of one major manufacturer decided that he must be doing something right: AEG-Telefunken last December placed its computer interests in a fifty-fifty partnership with Nixdorf; the two companies have formed a joint subsidiary to develop and produce large computers.
While Nixdorf was still a physics student at the University of Frankfurt in 1952, it struck him that most companies at that time could not afford the hulking computers being sold in Europe. He was convinced that he could build a small machine for only $8,000. So Nixdorf hopped on his motorbike and set out across the countryside to find a customer. Executives of a Ruhr Valley utility company were interested in what the brash fellow offered. After he finally built the machine, orders began coming in so fast that Nixdorf quit school and opened his own shop. Now he sells to 24 countries. Nixdorf-Computer sales last year were $99 million.
Nixdorf spends one-third of his time traveling, including three trips a year to the U.S. He works ten-hour days; on weekends he pores over technical books and periodicals, plays tennis and sails his 23-ft. boat, occasionally in international regattas. "Whatever I do is achievement oriented," Nixdorf says. "I want to compete."
The Clockwork Swiss
Pierre Waltz, 40-year-old chief executive of the $142-million-a-year Société Suisse pour l'Industrie Horlogère (SSIH) has made pulses tick faster throughout the Swiss watch industry. In the two years since he took over at SSIH, which makes Omega, Tissot and other watches, he has fired hundreds of workers to cut costs, merged with the country's major producer of inexpensive watches to meet increasing competition from the U.S. and Japan, bought out one U.S. firm (Hamilton) and entered into a joint venture with another (Optel, a liquid-crystal maker). "Some people call me the ugly American of Swiss industry," he says. "But you can't run a business on the basis of national glory."
Waltz started out working for Fabriques de Tabac Réunies, a cigarette manufacturer that was owned by his mother's family. The firm was taken over in 1962 by Philip Morris. Waltz stayed on as an executive for seven years, then quit because of "serious disagreements" with his bosses. He had hoped to take a long skiing vacation, but the directors of SSIH, figuring that Waltz was just the decisive executive to meet the Japanese and U.S. competition, lured him off the Alpine slopes.
Waltz figured that he could use his Philip Morris experience to advantage. "Traditionally," he says, "watchmaking has been a family business in Switzerland, and companies were beginning to lose ground to modern foreign enterprises. I had seen internationalization at work in the tobacco business, and I wanted to try the same thing in the production and marketing of watches."