Armancio Ortega Gaona born 28 March 1936) is a Spanish fashion executive and founding chairman of the Inditex fashion group, best known for its chain of Zara clothing and accessories retail shops. In early 2013 he was ranked as the third richest person in the world by Forbes with a net worth of $57 billion. The Bloomberg Billionaires Index
on March 22, 2013 listed Amancio Ortega Gaona as the world's fourth
richest person with reported combined assets of US$54.3 billion. He currently lives with his second wife in a discreet apartment building in the centre of A Coruña, Galicia, Spain.
The youngest of four children, Ortega was born in Busdongo de Arbás, León,
Spain, and spent his childhood in León. He moved to La Coruña at the
age of 14, due to the job of his father, a railway worker. Barely in his
teens, Ortega found a job as a shop hand for a local shirtmaker called
Gala, which still sits on the same corner in downtown La Coruña.
In 1972 he founded Confecciones Goa (his initials in reverse), selling
quilted bathrobes which Ortega produced using thousands of local women organised into sewing cooperatives. In 1975, he opened his first Zara store, so called because his preferred name Zorba was already taken. Today Zara is part of the Inditex
group (Industrias de Diseño Textil Sociedad Anónima), of which Ortega
owns 59.29%, and aside from over 6,000 stores includes the brands Zara, Massimo Dutti, Oysho, Zara Home, Kiddy's Class, Tempe, Stradivarius, Pull and Bear, Bershka and has more than 92,000 employees.
Ortega keeps a very low profile and until 1999 no photograph of
Ortega had ever been published. He goes to the same coffee shop everyday
and eats lunch with his employees in the company cafeteria. He refuses
to wear a tie and typically wears a simple uniform of a blue blazer,
white shirt and gray pants; none of which are Zara products. He is also said to take a very active part in the production and design process in the company.
When he made a public appearance in 2000 as part of the warm-up prior to his company's initial public offering on the stock market in 2001 it made headlines in the Spanish financial press. However, he has only granted interviews to three journalists ever and his secrecy has led to the publication of books such as Amancio Ortega: de cero a Zara (From Zero to Zara).
In 2011, Ortega announced his imminent retirement from Inditex, parent company of the Zara chain, stating that he would ask Inditex vice-president and CEO Pablo Isla to take his place at the helm of the textile empire.
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