Klaus Heymann

Klaus Heymann (born 22 October 1936) is a German entrepreneur and the founder and head of the Naxos record label.

Heymann was born in Frankfurt, Germany, and studied Romance languages and English at the Universities of Frankfurt and Lisbon, at King's College London and finally at the Sorbonne in Paris. To pay his way through university he worked as a tennis coach. He worked in advertising sales and special supplement production for an American newspaper in his native Frankfurt, then worked in international marketing for Braun AG. He first went to Hong Kong in 1967 to start up the office of the Overseas Weekly, the American newspaper he had worked for in Frankfurt. He "arrived with a suitcase and a typewriter, and strangely enough the hotel which had been booked for me didn't exist anymore." He subsequently created a direct-mail advertising business, then a mail-order company providing goods to members of the United States military in Vietnam. He sold such items as cameras, watches and audio equipment, including Bose speakers and Revox tape recorders.

Following the end of the war in Vietnam, Heymann became the Hong Kong distributor for Bose and Revox, and, later, Studer recording studio equipment. He began organizing classical music concerts to help boost the sales of the brands he sold. When Heymann found that many of the musicians who performed at these concerts could not find their recordings in Hong Kong record shops, he started importing a number of classical record labels, including Vox-Turnabout, Hungaroton, Supraphon and Opus Records, for his company Studer-Revox (Hong Kong) to be later renamed Pacific Music. Heymann was asked to join the board of the then amateur Hong Kong Philharmonic Orchestra in 1973, and helped this orchestra become a full-time professional orchestra in 1974. At this time, he also met his future wife, Japanese violinist Takako Nishizaki, who came to play as soloist with the Hong Kong Philharmonic.

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