This is my father’s job - Student Essay ~ Aglaia

This essay was written by Aglaia from Year 9. Aglaia has improved her English greatly over the course of the last 18 months:

My father is a businessman. He owns a company in Albania: The name of the company in the Agna Group. He started 17 years ago in 1991 when he was still studying Economics in university. This was a turbulent time and was the time communism in Albania was falling and the political system changed to a new democracy. During that period of time my father was in Greece visiting his brother Xristo.

When he came back he brought with him two boxes of chewing gum. One of the boxes had inside 200 pieces of gum ~ he gave them to his friends and his family. The second box he sold in the market. He gained some money from that so the second time he went to Greece he bought 10 boxes and then 30,50,100. Each time he went he brought back more and more boxes of gum.
That was very difficult for him because he had to go from Tirana in Gjirokastr in one day and another day from Gjirokasetr to Janina because the transport then was very bad. Naturally he had the same amount of time to come back. So it was that he made new clients.

This is how he started out. At that time he didn’t have a place to put the products or store them so he had to use his parent’s house. My grandparent’s house became his first warehouse where they were sleeping together with the products! Over time he kept bringing different products that Albania needed. The products were a lot and my father had lots of work to do so he called Xristo and Kosta- his uncles to work together with him. After some time they opened their first company “Anonime Kakavia”. Soon after creating this company they brought more and more products eg: ‘Pepsi’, ‘Amistal’, different detergents, etc. In 1992 with Jorgo Zoidhis – a close friend he opened the second company “Alpha” S.A. In 1995 they got ‘Karelia’ cigarettes and they became famous here.

In 1996 they bought the ‘Glina’ factory in Gjirokastra and in 1998 they bought ‘Albartex’. ‘Albartex’ is an outdoor advertizing company. In 1998 the main ‘Pepsi’ company in America asked if we could produce ‘Pepsi’ in Albania. My father replied that they could and asked them to let him do so. Soon we were making Pepsi by ourselves and not importing it any more from other countries. Later the company asked if we could make ‘Lipton Ice Tea’ again we tried and again it was a success.

In 2000 my dad and his partners opened ‘Anga Investor’ and they built the ‘Twin Towers’ in the center of Tirana. Once the Greek company AMC came to Albania my dad became the distributor for ‘Alba-Card’ and later, in 2002 he created a new company called ‘Tecom’ which has everything you need in the electronic devices range eg: Cable phones; Cel Phones; iPods; CD Players, MP3 and MP4 players etc.

By 2005 my dad and his partners had seven companies and they decided to put them under the general name of AGNA, these were: Alpha S.A., Anonime Kakavi, Albartex, Tecom, Agna Investitot, Alpha International Construction and On Time Concept.

The name AGNA comes from a combination of the two names: AGlaia and NAci. My father used the name of his mother to do this because she was the person who had inspired him, kept him in school, made him work hard and taught him to be a success. My grandmother is a VERY special person.