Nordstjernan
| Privately held Aktiebolag | |
| Founded | 1890 |
| Founder | Axel Johnson |
| Headquarters | , Sweden |
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Key people
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Tomas Billing (CEO), Viveca Ax:son Johnson (Chairman), Antonia Ax:son Johnson (Vice Chairman) |
| Website | Nordstjernan.se |
Nordstjernan (Swedish pronunciation: [ˈnuːɖˌɧæːɳan]) is a Swedish investment company. Nordstjernan is a fourth-generation family company controlled by the Axel and Margaret Ax:son Johnson Foundation. The origin is the shipping company Nordstjernan, which was founded in 1890.
The founder, Axel Johnson (1844-1910), was a businessman of his time and built up capital through knowledgeable share-trading. In 1890, he formed the Nordstjernan shipping company, which expanded rapidly. His business acumen, combined with personal contacts among the economic elite, meant that there were prerequisites for the development of the business concept in combination with a favourable level of financing.
By the start of the twentieth century, Axel Johnson was already a leading shipowner in Sweden and a pioneer of regular traffic to South America, with the La Plata route. It was Axel Johnson's final business transaction that put Nordstjernan on the map. He managed to break the international coffee monopoly, "the coffee conference", a strictly controlled pricing cartel for the transportation of coffee to Europe. Axel Johnson built, thanks to his talent, will and ambition, combined with favourable external factors, the company that was to form the basis of the Johnson Group, and which was later developed by his son, Axel Ax:son Johnson (1876-1958).
Axel Ax:son Johnson, or the Consul-General as he called himself, took over from his father in 1910, aged 34. New technology was introduced and old technology was sold before anyone else understood that it had become out-dated, such as the sale of steam vessels and the purchase of diesel-driven ships. Slightly more than 20 years later, in 1936, the Johnson Group was an exponent of modern Sweden. The Consul-General, who was described as "a collector of synergies," already had three major industrial deeds behind him by that time. At the start of the 1920s, Nordstjernan had the world's first diesel-driven ocean-going fleet and the head-start on competitors meant the ability to open new routes, particularly the Pacific Lines to the west coasts of North and South America via the Panama Canal. In 1924, he launched stainless steel in Sweden and, in 1928, he had Sweden's first oil refinery built in Nynäshamn.
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Wikipedia