Founder of Luxottica and CEO of EssilorLuxottica, leaves behind a business empire worth more than €27 billion
His story is one of those stories of a self-made man who, of humble origins, manages to place himself at the top of economic power. We are talking about Leonardo Del Vecchio, founder of Luxottica and CEO of EssilorLuxottica, the largest production and distribution company in the world of optics, who died this Monday in Milan, the city where he was born 87 years ago. He was considered one of the most important businessmen in Italy and the second richest person in the country after Giovanni Ferrero, owner of Nutella. He leaves behind his six children and his wife Nicoletta Zampillo, whom he married twice in a divorce, a business empire worth 27.3 billion euros, according to the latest calculations from Forbes magazine.
Fatherless, Del Vecchio’s mother had to leave her son in an orphanage in Milan because she worked all day and already had three other children to care for. However, at the age of 14, the boy moved back in with his family and got a job as an errand boy in a company in the morning, while in the afternoon he took a design and engraving course that was very useful to him. after. In 1961, at the age of 26, he established a workshop for the manufacture of spectacle frames on land donated by a municipality in a mountainous area of Belluno, in northern Italy, for new industrial projects.
The success for Luxottica, as he called his company, began in 1971 and was consolidated over the years until it became the world’s largest eyewear manufacturing company in 1995. Milestones include the purchase of the American brands Rayban and Oakley and the merger in 2018 with the French Essilor, a lens giant, to form EssilorLuxottica, a group that had a turnover of 21,500 million euros in 2021 and around 180,000 euros worldwide. employees count.
Del Vecchio asserted his humble origins and the value of effort to succeed in life. From his time in the orphanage and the time he worked in a factory while studying, he remembered “the discipline and method” he had learned. “For years my food was based on boiled cabbage. The fragrance reminds me of the great effort and the dreams I had to do something for myself, even if it was small, but where I could use my ideas and my abilities. Today, too many young people tend to pass the responsibility for their situation onto others, thinking that the state or their parents are not helping them enough. I always thought I was privileged because of the passion and the enormous desire to do things. I was sure that everything would depend on me and my work,” he said a few years ago.
The death of Del Vecchio, considered an example of a businessman with a social conscience for his charitable initiatives and the good terms and conditions of the Luxottica workers, was mourned by the Prime Minister, Mario Draghi. He considered him a ‘main character’ of the business world and a ‘great Italian’ who placed the country ‘at the center of the world of innovation’. Recognized with the title ‘Cavaliere’ of the work in 1986, Del Vecchio also had significant interests in banking, insurance and real estate companies, such as Mediobanca, Generali and Covivio.
Source: La Verdad
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