Mr. Niel, the French Internet entrepreneur, is a slightly disheveled 45-year-old fond of jeans and open-collared shirts. He is a high school graduate from a working-class Paris suburb who rails bluntly against the country’s established classes and a business elite culled from a handful of grande écoles — elite educational institutions.
But over the past two decades, Mr. Niel has amassed a net worth estimated by Forbes in March at $6.6 billion, emerging as France’s most influential technology entrepreneur, an opportunistic, controversial visionary whose low-cost Internet service provider and mobile network have made the Internet affordable for millions of French consumers.
To many struggling in France’s stagnant economy, Mr. Niel is a hero. But to a French business establishment grappling with the competitive disruptions of the Internet — not to mention the same stagnant economy — he is an unwelcome threat, a destroyer of profit margins.
“He represents the Internet world and the Internet economy, something that is not really appreciated in France,” said Cedric Manara, a law professor at Edhec, a business school in Paris. “He is not one of them. He represents what scares them — the big battlefield between the old and new economy.”
Mr. Niel says his goal is no less than to instill a Web-based entrepreneurial culture in France.
“If people like us don’t start to change things in France, nothing is ever going to change,” Mr. Niel said. “Today France is the fifth-largest economy in the world. But if we don’t change things, we will be the 25th biggest in just 10 years.”
The role of new economy evangelist did not come naturally to Mr. Niel, who grew up as an introvert in a middle-class home southeast of Paris, not far from where the Marne and Seine rivers meet. His father worked as a patent consultant for a French pharmaceutical maker. His mother was a bookkeeper. Mr. Niel said he was coaxed out of his shell by his younger sister, Véronique.
When he was 13, his father bought him his first computer, a Sinclair ZX81, which had no monitor and 1 kilobyte of memory. The gift would change his life.
“It was the only thing in the world where I could ask it to do something, and it would do it,” he said.
Mr. Niel’s audience has grown since.
In 1993, when he was 25, Mr. Niel created France’s first Internet service provider, WorldNet, which he sold seven years later, just before the dotcom bubble burst, for more than $50 million. In 2002, his second Internet service business, Free, sold the world’s first triple-play package of phone, television and Internet. The Freebox service cost just €29.99 a month, or about $40 at current exchange rates, about a third less than the going rate. The triple-play would not arrive in the United States until three years later.
Free has since added a Blu-ray disc player, a digital recorder and unlimited domestic mobile calls to the Freebox package, but it still has not raised the basic price. The company is France’s second largest Internet service provider, behind Orange, owned by the former telephone monopoly, France Télécom.
But the ISP business was only a warm-up. In January 2012, he created Free Mobile, which became France’s fourth cellphone network operator. In another break with convention, Free sold a no-strings-attached SIM card service with unlimited calls, text and Internet for €19.99 a month, less than half what the other three — Orange, SFR and Bouyges Télécom — had been charging.
This came after the three bigger operators had tried unsuccessfully to persuade the European Commission to block Free’s mobile license. Since its inception, Free Mobile is estimated to have cost the top three operators millions in profit, as all created new, lower-cost plans to compete.
Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/06/business/global/xavier-niel-billionaire-who-breaks-the-mold.html?partner=rss&emc=rss
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