Hello and Welcome to The Sir Alan Sugar Appreciation Society,Here's just a little bit of infomation on our favourite cockney capitalist,
Sir Alan Michael Sugar (born 24 March 1947 in Hackney, East London) is an English businessman. After leaving school at 16, Sugar started selling car aerials and electrical goods out of a van he had bought with his savings of £100. He now has an estimated fortune of £830m. and was ranked 84th in the Sunday Times Rich List 2007. Despite being best known as a technology businessman, most of Sugar's wealth now derives from his property portfolio in Mayfair, rather than business ventures.Sugar was knighted in 2000 for services to business. He holds two honorary Doctorates of Science degrees, awarded in 1988 by City University and in 2005 by Brunel University. He is a donor to the British Labour Party and a philanthropist for charities such as Jewish Care and Great Ormond Street Hospital.
Admired by many, in 1968 Sugar founded the electronics company Amstrad (an acronym of his initials – Alan Michael Sugar Trading). By 1970, the first manufacturing venture was underway. He achieved lower production prices by using the injection moulding plastics for hi-fi turntable covers, severely undercutting competitors who used the vacuum forming process. Manufacturing capacity was soon expanded to include the production of audio amplifiers and tuners. 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 Amstrad CPC 464. Although the CPC range were attractive machines, with CP/M-capability and a good BASIC operating system, it had to compete with its arch-rivals, the more graphically complex Commodore 64 and the popular Sinclair ZX Spectrum. Despite this, three million units were sold worldwide with a long production life of eight years, even inspiring an East German version with Russian Z80 clone processors. In 1985, Sugar had another major breakthrough with the launch of the Amstrad PCW 8256 word processor which, although made of very cheap components, retailed at over £300. 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 own 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 the 1990s, Amstrad bought into Betacom and Viglen, so as 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, At the time of the launch of Sky Amstrad was the only manufacturer producing receiver boxes and dishes and has continued to manufacture set top boxes, including Sky's Sky+ box.At its peak, Amstrad achieved a stock market value of £1.25 billion.
Amsprop is an investment firm owned by Sir Alan Sugar and controlled by his son Daniel. In September 2006 it bought the IBM South Bank building from private investors for £115 million. (UK European Investments bought the 217,000 sq ft building in 2003 for £76.5 million.) The IBM Centre occupies a prime site between the river and Upper Ground east of the National Theatre and west of ITV's London Television Centre. IBM's lease runs for another eight years. The trade press speculates that the site is likely to present a major redevelopment opportunity. (Source: London SE1 news). In the 13th June 2007 episode of The Apprentice, the two finalists will be shown proposing designs for the building to replace the IBM building.Sugar became the star of the BBC reality show The Apprentice which has had three series broadcast in 2005, 2006 and 2007, and in which he has the role of the boss (the same as Donald Trump in the US version).This means that Sugar "fires" a candidate each week until one candidate is left, who is then employed in Sugar's company (although, technically, the candidates are not actually "fired", at that point, they are not in the employment of the company). Every week, he eliminates a contestant with the utterance "You're fired!", which has become a popular catchphrase in both the US and the UK.The candidates are split into teams and Sugar uses his contacts in the business world to get them assignments in such establishments as Harrods department store. In addition, he chooses rewards for the winning team, such as a trip to Monaco or on the Orient Express train.Sugar reprised his role in the second series of The Apprentice, broadcast on BBC2 in February/March 2006 and in the third series, broadcast in March–June 2007 on BBC One.As a condition for appearing in the third series, Sugar placed a requirement that the show be more business-orientated rather than just entertainment and that he should be portrayed in a less harsh light, to counter his somewhat belligerent reputation. He also expressed a desire that the calibre of the candidates should be higher than those who had appeared in the second series (who had come across as manifestly lacklustre) and that the motives of the candidates for participating are scrutinised more carefully, given that certain of the candidates in previous series had used their successful experience in the show as a springboard to advance their own careers (as occurred with Michelle Dewberry, the winner of the second series).Alan has criticised the US version of "The Apprentice" because "they’ve made the fatal error of trying to change things just for the sake of it and it backfired."On 18 May 2007, the BBC announced that two further series of The Apprentice will be made.A celebrity Apprentice special for BBC TV's charity fund raising event Comic Relief was broadcast in March 2007 featuring Alastair Campbell, Piers Morgan, Ross Kemp, Rupert Everett, Danny Baker, Cheryl Cole, Jo Brand, Maureen Lipman, Trinny Woodall and Karren Brady. The team raised over £1 million for the charity.
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