#Luminaries – George Logothetis

George Michael Logothetis (born 18 January 1975) is an American and British businessman. He is from a Greek shipping family, grew up in London and has British citizenship, and has lived in New York City since 2004. In 2014 Fortune named him one of its “40 under 40”.

Logothetis is the executive chairman of Libra Group, a diversified international privately owned conglomerate company which he founded in 2003. As of 2017, the Libra Group owns and operates 30 subsidiary companies around the world, mainly in six separate industries: aviation leasing, renewable energy, hotels and hospitality services, real estate, financial services and diversified investments, and shipping.

Logothetis started working at his father’s shipping company, Lomar Shipping, in 1993 at the age of 18. By 1995 he was CEO of the company. Over the next ten years, he enlarged the fleet from less than five to more than 70 ships.

Logothetis’s philosophy from the start was to work hard, and then take three to five months off every five years to reflect about the next five years. During these hiatuses, he avoids work emails and phone calls, believing that “ideas need space to be born”. On his first sabbatical, he travelled around Asia, and on his second, he did some university studies in New York City.

During his three-month sabbatical in New York, the idea of diversification came to him. In 2003 Logothetis, with his brother Constantine, created and founded the Libra Group, based in New York and London, to diversify and expand his company.

Between 2004 and 2007, during a boom in the shipping business, the Libra Group sold off most of Lomar’s ships. With the profit from the ship sales, the new company purchased a fleet of airplanes, which were at a cyclical low, and set up an aircraft leasing division, Lease Corporation International. Logothetis repeated this successful “buy-low, sell-high” formula of going counter to prevailing market trends several times in the ensuing decade, building a large diversified multinational conglomerate out of what was once a small shipping company.

“The idea behind Libra was to diversify away from shipping to create a global group, using the top lieutenants we had worked with in the preceding years”, Logothetis told Reuters in 2013. He told Fortune he “took all the great people from our shipping business, and sent them around the world to start companies. We ended up with a ship’s captain running a $200 million real estate company and a Russian fruit seller who runs six biogas plants in Latvia.”

He later reiterated to BBC News how he expanded and diversified the company: “‘We designed a framework of all the places in the world that we wanted to have an office and representation in. Next to each place we put the name of a person that we knew – a family member, a friend or an employee.’ These people were sent out to different locations and given the chance to learn new businesses.”

In 2006, the Libra Group started expanding beyond aviation. Its new major ventures included real estate, hotels and hospitality, and renewable energy.

In December 2009, after ship values slumped in the wake of the financial crisis, Logothetis again entered the shipping business and purchased Allocean and its fleet of 26 ships. From December 2009 through December 2014, the company purchased a total of 91 vessels.

The Libra Group has also expanded beyond its core businesses of shipping, aviation, real estate, hotels and hospitality, and renewable energy, to include a variety of interests including helicopter leasing, financial services and diversified investments, media, and construction. Between 2008 and 2014, the company purchased $7 billion to $7.5 billion of assets globally. As of 2017, the Libra Group owns and operates 30 subsidiary companies around the world.

Logothetis has been an advocate for and an investor in Greece during the Greek financial crisis. And as a result of the crisis, he has become a sought-after business leader for his opinions on investing in Greece and in Greek assets, products, and industries. In June 2012, following prime minister Antonis Samaras’s election and instatement, he emphasised that the promise of governmental stability was bringing back business confidence and individual confidence in Greece, and noted Libra Group’s numerous recent and projected Greek investments and businesses.

In March 2013, he cited Samaras’s coalition government’s relieving the Greek eurozone crisis as a reason investors were returning to, and should continue to return to, Greece. In late 2013, he sounded a cautionary note concerning the “buying frenzy” occurring in the slump-ridden shipping sector. Speaking to a reporter in January 2014 at Davos, he encouraged businesspersons to see the opportunity available in Greece, and stated that he felt that 2014 would be “the year of Greek growth”. He reiterated his optimism in March 2014, noting that the Libra Group had invested $500 million in Greece since 2012.