Entrepreneur founded Modern Times Group
AMSTERDAM — Swedish entrepreneur Jan Stenbeck, who transformed his family’s steel and forestry industry into a billion-dollar telco and media empire, died in the American Hospital in Paris of a heart attack Monday. He was 59.
Stenbeck was well known for challenging the Swedish state monopoly on broadcasting when he launched TV3, the first commercial TV network in Scandinavia, in the mid-1980s.
A decade later, his pan-Euro telco Tele2 succeeded in challenging the state-owned telecom monopoly Telia for its fixed and mobile phone businesses. Telia was privatized in 2000.
He founded the Modern Times Group (MTG), a media outfit that includes TV broadcasting, production and distribution companies, digital platform ViaSat and radio and merchandising companies.
Hans Holger Albrecht, chief exec of MTG, told Daily Variety, “Stenbeck’s high energy and spirit and fantastic vision had a huge impact on the Nordic media scene. He was one of the most outstanding people I’d ever met.”
Born and reared in Stockholm, Stenbeck graduated from Harvard University and settled in New York.
He gained respect from his rivals for his risk-taking and entrepreneurial daring, but his American style of leadership and sometimes cutthroat approach to business did not always go down well in Sweden’s more consensual corporate culture.
While Stenbeck spun MTG off from Kinnevik as an independent company in the mid-’90s, he remained its largest shareholder. A similar pattern was followed with Tele2 and his other companies.
His complex web of cross-media holdings, held by holding companies Invik and Kinnevik, has often worried investors, especially over the past eight months when his companies lost 60% of their market cap under current market conditions.
His empire includes Metro, an international free newspaper distributed in subways across the globe, cellular operator Millicom, as well as Swedish pulp and paper concern Korsnas. He also founded Vodafone, the world’s largest cell-phone operator.
His 24-year-old daughter, Christina, born and reared in the U.S., is expected to eventually succeed him in taking over the business. He also is survived by three other children.
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