News

Michael Gansser-Potts

Job Title: European Business Director of Amtico (the vinyl flooring manufacturer)
Age: 36

MICHAEL GANSSER-POTTS was a member of the team that led the management buy-out of Amtico from its parent Courtaulds in 1995, and by last year the company had reached a turnover of £68m.

Since then, the global slowdown has begun to affect Amtico. Its growth rates have slowed in the US, and a fragile European recovery has been stifled before it gathered any momentum.

The past 12 months have been tough, and the general outlook is more pessimistic now than it was last year, says Gansser-Potts. 'Our view, however, is that the US will pick up again soon, and that the rest of the world will follow, so the outlook may not be as pessimistic as some would have us believe.'

While the company's business year has been tough, it has made one significant investment for the future - the creation of a new company in Sweden, of which GansserPotts is chairman. 'For the last 20 years we have sold our products through two distributors in Sweden. The distributors have managed a tolerable co-existence over the years, but in September 2000 it became clear that they were not prepared to carry on working side by side,' he says.

The agreed solution was to create a three-way joint venture company, Amtico International AB, in which each party took an equity stake. The new company started trading on 1 April 2001 and is already proving successful.