BEKKER SERVES TO WIN
Upstream, 15.02.2002
ARNGOLT Bekker is a self–made businessman who has defeated the national pastimes of theft and laziness to create Russia's largest pipeline construction company. Turnover at Stroytransgaz has skyrocketed from $50 million to $1.5 billion in just one decade.
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Living with a legacy: Bekker
spent his childhood in exile
with his peasant family in
Kazakhstan thanks to a Stalin
decree. Hard work allowed him
to overcome official hurdles,
and now he wants to crack open
the gas riches lurking in the
Yamal peninsula.
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Bekker, 66, still spends much of his time setting strategic priorities and fighting for lucrative contracts. However, he also dedicates many hours to charity work and sponsoring cultural events, Orthodox churches, and energy industry educational establishments.
All the while his company works like a Swiss-made watch, building fault-free oil and gas pipelines and supporting infrastructure across Russia, Europe and Africa.
When established in 1990, Stroytransgaz seemed to be just another one of the thousands of companies created on the crest of unfolding reforms, whose goal was to transform a socialist state into a capitalist economy.
Most of those young companies from the early 1990s have perished as their directors either ran away with the profits or went out of business unable to cope with tough operating conditions.
The difference was that Stroytransgaz employed Bekker and around three dozen of his friends and colleagues from the Soviet gas industry ministry.
Bekker says that the initial goal was to provide engineering services to gas monopoly Gazprom. The company's first assignment was simple to build local gas pipeline grids and compressor stations in the Ulyanovsk region to supply Gazprom gas to end-users, he says.
However, Bekker adds that as reforms in Russia led to the privatisation of the formerly single energy complex, he realised there was a chance for Stroytransgaz to turn from an engineering firm with intangible human resources into a holding company that controls its sub-contractors and has tangible assets.
Today, Stroytransgaz holds stakes of between 25% and 70% in 24 enterprises around Russia, which can handle various construction tasks for oil and gas companies, produce gas equipment and also provide engineering research and development. The group employs about 22,000 people, Bekker says.
His success appears to be based on simple principles work hard, take care of the people who work with you, follow the rule of the law, re-invest profits into the company's development, employ educated people and bring in the most recent technologies. However simple and familiar these principles may sound to someone born in the West, they were very difficult to implement in Russia.
The population had plunged into an orgy of theft, laziness, drunkenness, apathy and alienation following the decades of the totalitarian Soviet regime and then failed market reforms. Bekker himself suffered under the old order, exiled as a child with his peasant family to Kazakhstan. In August 1941, Joseph Stalin ordered nationwide purges of German peasants who moved to Russia's southern regions in the 18th century following an invitation from Russia's then queen Katherine II.
However, undefeated by the difficulties, Bekker managed to graduate from Chelyabinsk construction school in 1958, earning money for living by renovating residential flats.
His real career kicked off in 1964 when he moved to the Tyumen region in western Siberia, which was a rapidly growing new source of oil and gas for the Soviet Union.
He spent almost 20 years there, participating in nearly all the oil and gas construction projects in the region, before moving to Moscow in 1985 to become head of the construction and transport department in the Soviet gas industry ministry. Bekker says that he always argued for private ownership because it allows a business to grow more quickly. Stroytransgaz is a private company today with shares spread between Bekker and his colleagues who teamed up together back in 1990.
The boss says that humble people in Russia have not yet adjusted to survive in a capitalist market. That is why Stroytransgaz offers numerous social benefits to employees, ranging from free in-house medical services, payments of lump-sum amounts to workers when they get married and have children, pensions for retired employees, company–sponsored education and leisure trips to Black Sea coastal resorts.
Bekker says that in Russia, a successful company director is obliged to furnish as many benefits as possible for his workers. Most of those go to replace the benefits that were provided by the state in the past but were lost among turbulent market reforms.
Company perks are a major part of Bekker's effort to combat theft and win loyalty from employees. "We say simply, do not steal. If you need something tell me. I will see what I can do," he says.He adds that last year, Stroytransgaz bought 100 residential flats for its employees in Moscow.
Vladimir Afanasiev
