In the early 90s, when most Romanians drove Dacias, Zoltan Teszari went extravagant: he bought a bright red Audi 80. In a country just emerging from Soviet rule, the acquisition was an unusual display of wealth.

It is one of the few known episodes of Teszari, 54, a former judo champion turned businessman and founder of Digi, the Romanian telecommunications company that began operations in the Portuguese market this week. Teszari is a figure who stays away from public attention; It is so discreet that in Romania it is known as “the faceless billionaire”. According to economic research capital magazine, It was even Teszari who wanted to be nicknamed that.

Appearances at public events and interviews have been practically non-existent in recent years and the press has had to look for alternative solutions to illustrate the news about Teszari: use a photograph from almost 20 years ago, from when he received an entrepreneurship award, or an image of paparazzimost recently, when he was caught talking on the phone during a walk in a park. Romanian newspapers say that cameras “are their biggest enemy.” “He doesn’t want to appear in photographs. Its principle is that memories should remain in the mind, not in photographs,” a friend of the businessman revealed to Capital Magazine.

Zoltan Teszari, former judo champion and future telecommunications champion in Belgium? https://t.co/wq8adCW6FR

— La Libre (@lalibrebe) October 12, 2024

With so much secrecy, there is little certainty about the current appearance of Romania’s 14th richest man. According to estimates of the Forbes Romania conducted in 2023, the discreet businessman has an estimated net worth of 1.9 billion Romanian lei, equivalent to about 382 million euros, linked mainly to the area of ​​telecommunications. Although with some fluctuations, he has been a regular presence on the list of the richest Romanians since at least 2010.

Initially he had a regular presence in the daily tasks of the telecommunications company. But, according to stories from former workers, it was difficult to interact with him. “No one at Digi knows how to get to Tészari,” a former employee of the company told the Romanian magazine. Virtually all the sources interviewed for that work spoke anonymously, summarizing that the businessman Be especially careful who you talk to and about what.

Digi. There is a new telecommunications company in Portugal. What changes?

In 2015, Teszari handed over the CEO role to Serghei Bulgac and took on non-executive roles on the board of directors. Without the day-to-day routine, the mystery surrounding the figure of the businessman deepened and accompanied the growth of Digi, which meanwhile entered into markets such as Spain, Italy and, now, Portugal, with apparently competitive offers.

Maintaining the aura of mystery, it is not clear what the businessman’s main address is, who still owns 60% of Digi. According to those close to him, to this day he still maintains a modest office in Oradea, his hometown. The Romanian press speculates that he divides his time between a residence near a complex in Transylvania and Budapest, Hungary. His private life is also sparse in details, apart from the fact that he has a son, Christian Zoltan Teszari, who competed in several tennis tournaments, and who will be 19 or 20 years old.

Life before Digi, from judo matches to the ice cream business

Zoltan Teszari was born on September 14, 1970 in Oradea, Romania, a city a few kilometers from the Hungarian border. The family, a minority of Hungarian origin in the city, had a modest income during the communist regime. His father, Zoltan, was a mechanic and his mother, Idiko, was dedicated to science.

The family always remained in Oradea. After the Revolution of ’89, when the years of eldorado For small Romanian entrepreneurs, young Zoltan’s parents created, in 1991, a car service company called Tesazai SRL. Today it operates under the name Autocenter and, according to local newspapers, has “a certain prestige” in the country.

The Romanian businessman’s schoolmates described Zoltan as Capital Magazine as a young man who had no notable academic achievements, but possessed a “acute mental capacity” and an excellent athlete.

always since few words and very thoughtfulThe already discreet Zoltan only stood out in one place: the tatami, where he revealed himself as an athlete committed to the arts of judo. When he finished high school, at the age of 18, he was invited to the CS Dinamo judo team, in the capital Bucharest.

It was during his trips abroad that Zoltan Teszári began to show interest in the business world. Outside Romania he was able to obtain many items that his compatriots had difficult access to, such as whiskey, certain brands of clothing, cigarettes or coffee. The formula was easy: buy cheap in the countries where you were going to compete but sell high at home, with a generous profit margin. The discreet young man now has money and the goal of increasing his assets. He only gave in to one extravagance: the purchase of that red Audi, an act that, in the opinion of a close colleague of the time, served as a consolation prize for not being judo champion in Athens.

In 1991, after the Revolution, Zoltan returned to Oradea, where he decided to invest the profits from his sales in an ice cream parlor, Rubin & King, located in the backyard of a church. The location will not have been innocent.. “The Zoli [como foi apelidado por um amigo próximo] “I thought everything very intelligently,” the friend said to Capital Magazine. He first chose one of his friends, Ludescher Csaba, as a business partner. “He chose it because he was the grandson of Bishop Tempfli Jozsef and so they could use the backyard of the Roman Catholic Church, which was a very good area for this type of business.” Rubin & King, named after a combination of the founders’ nicknames, has grown to become the largest ice cream production distributor in Transylvania.

The business sweetened the duo’s financial life and later served as a pillar for the creation of another business, the importation of television equipment, until it finally evolved into a telecommunications company.

an empire made in Romania, which started in telecommunications and now reaches the media

Teszari’s company went through several stages to reach what it is today. But it all started with a cable television business in 1992, which was then called TVS Holding Brasov. According to Digi’s history page, it only provided services in Timisoara and Brasov, two of Romania’s main cities. Four years later, founder Teszari decided to expand his company and the name was no longer just regional: Romania Cable Systems SA, known as RCS, was born.

For a few years, RCS grew organically and embraced the novelty of the Internet. In addition to cable television services, Internet access is now available nationwide. This is how a subsidiary of RCS called Romania Data Systems (RDS) emerged in 1997. It is at the turn of the millennium when tenure Digi Communications.

A few years later, the company entered the voice-to-landline business, offering landline calling only to business customers and international customers. In 2004, after an interconnection agreement with Telekom Romania, it became widespread in the fixed telephony market. In December of that same year, the Digi brand appeared on the market, to reflect DTH services (straight home).

During all these years, the founder and CEO’s words to the press were few. It was not until 2002, in rare frank statements, that he showed his ambition. “I want to make RCS the most important telecommunications group in Romania,” he said. Capital Magazine.

Over time, the company adapted to market trends. With the expansion of the mobile network market and the popularization of 3G, a new brand emerged in 2007, Digi Mobil, dedicated solely to mobile telecommunications services.

After the network came its own television channels and radio stations. First, through sports channels until reaching an offer of four channels in Romania and three in Hungary. Today, Digi also has a pay movie service, called Digi Film, a news channel, Digi 24, and documentary channels (Digi World, Digi Life and Digi Animal World). It also has music channels (UTV and Hora TV) and participation in Music Channel. Since 2015 it also has four radio stations in Romania (Pro FM, Music FM, Dance FM and Digi FM).

Although Romania is Digi’s main market, Since 1998 international expansion is underway. Neighboring Hungary was the first country to test, and until 2006 Digi was trying to establish itself with “small subsidiaries” in Central and Eastern European countries. “Subsidiaries that we later got rid of,” specifies the company’s history page.

The fastest growing market outside of Romania was Spain, where the company has been present since 2008. Digi’s revenue for the Spanish market corresponds to Bloomberg: respond to the wave of Romanians emigrating to Spain, with the promise of low prices, affordable phone cards in convenience stores and customer service without language barriers, spoken in Romanian. Immigrants who wanted to “feel at home” were winked by Spaniards who were looking for landline internet and mobile phones at low prices. Today it has 6.1 million customers in Spain and, according to the data revealed by the company in the presentation in Lisbon, it is the fourth operator in the Spanish market, with a share of 9.1%. The company grew, in part, because it took advantage of the remedies implemented during the merger between the operators Orange and MásMóvil in the neighboring country, in 2023.

After Spain, Italy entered in 2010, and in 2021, after the 5G auction, Portugal entered Digi’s list of destinations. After almost three years, the company entered the Portuguese market this week with the “advantage”, as the CEO stated, of the acquisition of Nowo, for 150 million euros. After Portugal, Belgium follows, a country where the company acquired 5G spectrum in 2023.

Digi advances to buy Nowo for 150 million

Digi’s expansion has also been marked by some controversies, notably the one that overshadowed the company’s initial public offering (IPO) in 2017. When it went public in Bucharest with an IPO worth €190 million, the largest ever manufactured by a telecommunications company in RomaniaHe was also facing a corruption scandal related to the sale of broadcast rights to football matches in the Romanian Football League. At that time, Ioan Bendei, Teszari’s partner, was accused of having bribed the then president of the Romanian Football League with 3.5 million euros. Controversies and investigations aside, even listing was not enough to expose the “faceless billionaire.”