Aleksandr Timonin

AVTOVAZ Joint Stock Company, or OAO AVTOVAZ (Avtovaz), manufactures nearly three-quarters of the light automobiles sold in Russia, producing around 700,000 cars a year. State economic planners founded the company in the late 1960s in order to provide an affordable car for the Soviet citizen, and the so-called "Zhigulis" soon became a familiar icon of life in the U.S.S.R. They were exported to European countries under the brand name "Lada." Even after the fall of the communist system, Avtovaz's cars have retained their market leadership due to their affordability, familiarity, and simplicity of design. The company's best-selling models are the new Lada 110 line and the updated version of the classic Zhiguli. Avtovaz also offers the Samara sedan and the rugged all-wheel drive Niva truck. Since privatization in 1993, Avtovaz has been struggling to improve production efficiency, develop newer models, and gain control of distribution. The company employs about one-sixth of the city of Togliatti. Recently, Avtovaz entered an alliance with General Motors to produce an updated version of the Niva truck at a new facility in Togliatti.

The Five-Year Plan for economic development in the U.S.S.R. during 1966-70 called for the construction of a new automobile factory. This factory would provide for the first large-scale production of light cars in the U.S.S.R., producing an accessible consumer vehicle for the Soviet people and their neighbors in the Communist bloc. In July 1966 the Central Committee of the Communist Party passed a resolution calling for a plant at a site on the Volga River about 800 kilometers east of Moscow. A completely new settlement was to be built here, replacing an older village that had been flooded by a recently constructed dam. The new city was named Togliatti after Palmiro Togliatti, a longtime secretary of the Italian Communist Party. The car factory would be known as the Volga Automotive Plant, or AvtoVAZ. Viktor Nikolaevich Polyakov, the deputy minister of the automobile industry in the USSR, was appointed general director of the concern.

Avtovaz signed an agreement to work with Fiat, the Italian carmaker, on design of the car and the factory. In early 1967 ground was broken at the site, even as Fiat engineers were still working on final plans for the plant. Among the first buildings to be finished were a cafeteria and a housing development for workers. The Avtovaz project was promoted as a dynamic feat of collective socialist effort, and it brought together youth work brigades and technical specialists from a wide area. The first assembly line in the factory became operable in 1970. On April 19 of that year, the first car rolled off the production line in Togliatti. It was a four-door compact vehicle closely modeled after the Fiat 124. Officially, it was known as the VAZ-2101, but the automotive magazine Za rulyem sponsored a "Name the Car" contest for the vehicle. The winning name was "Zhiguli," after a nearby mountain range.

Monster Energy is a beverage company. The Company markets energy boost soft drink to retail food outlets and convenience stores throughout the United Kingdom and Europe. It also hosts action sports and motor sports to support their athletes. The company’s products, includes Original Monster Energy, Monster Lo-Carb, Monster Rehab, Monster Assault,Monster Khaos, the Monster juice hybrid M-80, and Java Monster, premium coffee supercharged with Monster Energy blend.

Zachary Cefaratti is Chief Executive Officer and principal founder of Dalma Capital Management Limited.

Zachary has over 12 years' professional experience in the financial services industry, having initially worked his way through his studies at Franklin University Switzerland, Foster School of Business at the University of Washington,London School of Economics and University of Pennsylvania while operating independent mortgage brokerage, merchant and insurance businesses. He holds a dual bachelor’s degree in International Finance and Banking and International Business Management.

Zachary began his search for alpha at age 7, when he began trading bonds and equities in an effort to grow assets he earned as a childhood film and television SAG/AFTRA actor. Throughout his career and education, he has been an active member of the investment community – he founded the Franklin University Investment Club and spearheaded the formation of the AIMA Middle East Executive Committee, representing the Alternative Investment Management Association in the MENASA Region. He was the principal organizer of the AIMA Middle East Hedge Fund Investors Summit and went on to found AIM Summit, the largest gathering of Hedge Fund, Private Equity, Venture Capital and Private Debt professionals in the Middle East. He regularly speaks at global industry events and has been a regular Market View contributor to the Khaleej Times.

His efforts at Dalma Capital have been dedicated to seeking alpha generating portfolio managers and strategies, providing a platform on which they can maximize their alpha realization and capture. This is achieved by significantly reducing barriers to entry, substantial complexity, distribution hurdles, time to market and operating costs without compromising the robust operational, regulatory, legal and technological infrastructure that institutions demand.

Dalma Capital was original founded as a single hedge fund manager. It has expanded its portfolio of funds to include venture capital, private debt, private equity and digital asset funds. It is a global leader in digital asset fund management, with 6 mandated digital asset funds currently under management.

Dalma Capital also operates anaccelerator and incubator platform for emerging fund managers demonstrating a strong propensity for generating alpha - providing full front to back office infrastructure, legal and regulatory support and capital.

In addition to principal investments, the firm also provides regulated investment banking services and support to blockchain based security, platform and token protocol offering - including structuring, book-running, placement and liquidity management.

Axel Lennart Wenner-Gren (5 June 1881 – 24 November 1961) was a Swedish entrepreneur and one of the wealthiest men in the world during the 1930s.

He was born on 5 June 1881 in Uddevalla, a town on the west coast of Sweden. He was the fourth of six children (four girls and two boys) born to Leonard and the much younger Alice Wenner-Gren (née Albin), though only three of them grew to adulthood, Axel himself, his oldest sister Anna, and his younger brother Hugo.

Having spent his school years in Uddevalla, Wenner-Gren moved to Gothenburg where he was employed for five years in the spice importing company of a maternal uncle. During this time, he learned English, French, and German at the local Berlitz school, and music at the local YMCA In 1902, at the age of 21, he left Sweden to further his studies in Germany. He first studied in the university town of Greifswald where he took some summer courses before moving on to Berlin where he studied at the Berliner Handelsakademie from which he graduated much sooner than usual.

After some difficulty, he found work with the German subsidiary of Alfa Laval Separator where he developed skills as a salesman, before quitting in 1904 to work selling agricultural machinery near Stuttgart which, with financial support from his father, had become his first financial enterprise.

In 1908, he traveled to America where he learned about engines for agricultural use, returning to Europe the same year. While in Vienna in 1908 he saw the Santo vacuum cleaner in the shop of Gustaf Paalen who had exclusive rights to distribute them throughout Europe. After initially failing to become a European distributor for the Santo vacuum cleaner in his own right, he entered into a partnership with Paalen, purchasing a twenty percent interest in the company.

Earlier in his life he notably collaborated with Fredrik Ljungström.

Wenner-Gren amassed a fortune from his early insight that the industrial vacuum cleaner could be adapted for domestic use. Soon after the First World War he persuaded the Swedish lighting company (called Lux at the time, but with his suggestion to rename it to Electrolux) for which he then worked (securing the contract to floodlight the opening ceremony of the Panama Canal, among other successes), to buy the patent to a home vacuum cleaner. He asked that instead of compensating him in cash, he would receive company stock based on the sales of the vacuum cleaner. The Electrolux cleaner was so successful that by the early 1930s, Wenner-Gren had become the majority owner of Electrolux, and the firm was a leading brand in both vacuum cleaner and refrigerator technology.

Wenner-Gren also diversified his interests into the ownership of newspapers, banks and arms manufacturers, and acquired many of the holdings of the disgraced safety-match tycoon Ivar Kreuger. In Mexico in the 1930s, he was in economic alliance with Maximino Ávila Camacho, strongman of the Mexican state of Puebla, whose brother Manuel Ávila Camacho became President of Mexico in 1940.

Wenner-Gren was reported to be a friend of Hermann Göring, whose first wife was a Swede, and in the late 1930s convinced himself that he could avert the coming world war by acting as a conduit between Göring and the British and American governments. His efforts proved unsuccessful, with all parties regarding him as a self-promoting nuisance without much influence on the plans of the Nazi regime. However, others are suspicious of his role in the war, citing how (his) original Bank of the Bahamas was used to fund the Nazis and his friendship with Göring as potential proof of his private support for the Nazis.

A disconsolate Wenner-Gren retired to his estate in The Bahamas, in Hog Island (now Paradise Island), where he resumed his friendship with the islands' governor, the Duke of Windsor, and former King of the United Kingdom, Edward VIII. Early in the war his rumored friendship with Göring and the suspected German sympathies of the Duke led first the Americans and, following their lead, the British, to place him on an economic blacklist, enabling them to freeze his assets in Nassau. There proved to be little or no foundation to their suspicions that Wenner-Gren was a Nazi agent, notwithstanding the appearance of his steam yacht Southern Cross (the world's largest at the time) along with ships from the Allied Navies at the site of the sinking of the liner SS Athenia on the first day of the war. Wenner-Gren's yacht Southern Cross rescued over three hundred survivors of the sinking and transferred some to nearby Allied ships and others continued to the U.S.

In the 1950s, Wenner-Gren also got involved in the early computer business. For a railroad project connecting California with Alaska, he got in touch with Glenn Hagen, previously an engineer with Northrop Aircraft, who had founded Logistics Research in Redondo Beach outside Los Angeles, developing computers based on magnetic drum memory. In November 1952, Wenner-Gren helped the company to incorporate. He soon controlled the company and renamed it ALWAC (the Axel L. Wenner-Gren Automatic Computer). ALWAC I was used in 1953, ALWAC IIand ALWAC III in 1954, ALWAC III-E in 1955. In 1956 and 1957, the model ALWAC III-E was considered a competitor to the IBM 650, having fewer parts and good economy, but no more than 30 units seem to have been delivered. Soon after this, magnetic drum machines were made obsolete by the introduction of the magnetic core memory. By 1956 the number of employees tripled to over 300 and the company was relocated to an industrial park in Hawthorne, California. The appearance of the transistor in the electronics industry in 1957 was a financial shock for all vacuum tube computer makers and by 1958 ALWAC in Hawthorne closed and its employees, with the help of Wenner-Gren himself, were successfully hired by Litton Industries and Autonetics and several smaller electronics companies. The follow-up ALWAC 800 was a failed design that never went beyond prototype, using not only core memory but also magnetic logic (a combination of semiconductor diodes and magnetic cores, cf. Hewitt Crane), and presold contracts nearly ruined the company. Development was transferred to Sweden in 1958. The next model, named Wegematic 1000, a slight upgrade of the III-E, was shipped in 1960. Only a dozen were delivered and half of them were give-aways to universities, including one unit for the Weizmann Institute in Israel. In exchange, Wenner-Gren received several honorary titles.

Among Wenner-Gren's other interests were monorail train systems. His company, ALWEG, built the original Disneyland Monorail System in 1959 and the Seattle Center Monorail in 1962. Wenner-Gren continued his fascination with speculative railway projects, as he collaborated with Canadian W.A.C. Bennett to build a railway north from Prince George into the untapped Peace River, Rocky Mountain Trench and eventually Alaska. Parts of the railway were built by the Pacific Great Eastern Railway after Wenner-Gren's death, including the needless Fort Nelson branch, yet the meeting produced outcomes lasting to this day. The interest in the north spurred a spate of mega-industrial projects in the region: the Bennett Dam flooding vast valleys, gas pipelines and plants at Taylor, coal mines and pulp mills.

In late 1909, while returning from a trip to America on board a trans-Atlantic liner, he met Marguerite Gauntier Liggett who had been born on 15 October 1891 in Kansas City, Missouri. She was traveling with her sister, actress Gene Gauntier, to Europe to complete her musical training as an opera singer. After a brief romance at sea, they traveled to London, where they married on 14 December 1909 before traveling on to Berlin where she would complete her studies.

KUKA is a global automation corporation with sales of around 2.6 billion euro and roughly 14,000 employees. The company is headquartered in Augsburg, Germany. As one of the world’s leading suppliers of intelligent automation solutions, KUKA offers customers everything they need from a single source: from robots and cells to fully automated systems and their networking in markets such as automotive, electronics, metal & plastic, consumer goods, e-commerce/retail and healthcare.