Avis company head
“That is Mazepa,” said Bjorn Markstedt, smiling, as he noticed my glance at the opposite wall. It was decorated with several oil portraits of famous Ukrainians, with Cossack leader Ivan Mazepa depicted on the largest canvas. “Mazepa was with the Swedish king. As you know, I’m from Sweden, and it was the most serious attempt of Ukraine to become independent,” Bjorn explained to me. “History was my best subject at school, but then I began studying economics and started a business,” Bjorn said with a sigh and added that he actually doesn’t have any favourite historical period, “the future is always getting better and better,” he concluded.
Moreover, Bjorn’s interest in Ukraine goes far beyond the borders of the historical sphere; he proclaimed Ukraine his true homeland. “I grew up in a small town of 7000 people, near the border, then I came to Stockholm, then to Uppsala, then to a small town in the mountainous area near Stockholm, so I can’t say which city I’m exactly from,” Bjorn laughed. He left Sweden more then ten years ago and started the Kyiv office of the car leasing and rental agency Avis. That was not the beginning of his interaction with Ukraine: “I first came to Kyiv seventeen years ago and met my wife here, now we have two children – a son that is ten years old and a daughter that turned one month yesterday,” said Bjorn proudly.
Regarding my question about the difference between women in Western Europe and in Ukraine he said: “The differences depend on the person, but Ukrainian women are more ‘women’, though they are very strong at the same time.” However, according to Bjorn, “Ukrainian mothers are too soft with their boys,” taking care of their sons until they are married or longer, “so many men think of their marriage as a way to have their house cleaned and their clothes washed.”
Gradually our conversation touched upon Bjorn’s business experiences: “I started business in the Baltic countries, in Estonia, and then I began looking for other opportunities in Eastern Europe, searching for a country that had more potential,” Bjorn said. Recalling his first project in the tourism sector in Estonia, he named that position as a background to his future work in the post-Soviet sphere – Belarus and Ukraine.
The first attempt to start an Avis office in Ukraine failed, since, according to Bjorn, “The Ukrainian market wasn’t ready for the franchise,” so he tried it first in Belarus, leaving for Ukraine only three years later. During his next attempt the main difficulty appeared to be with car leasing or outsourcing, which “was not a widespread way of doing business in Ukraine,” Bjorn noted. “At first we had foreign clients, because they were already used to buying services, and very few Ukrainian companies, but we had experienced the same problem in Estonia at the beginning,” he explained.
According to Bjorn, people in post-Soviet countries were surprised at the procedures required to rent a car. “The legislation and the way of thinking are not developed in relation to our business in Ukraine,” Bjorn explained and named the lack of development of the automobile infrastructure as the major problem in comparison to other European countries. “The number of cars is growing quickly, but the investment into the infrastructure is very small,” Bjorn argued. According to him, the situation could be changed by increasing taxes on car sales, investing in infrastructure, and limiting the access of cars into the city, which, admittedly “is a delicate political question, because nobody wants to pay more money.”
When I found out that Bjorn was at one time deeply interested in politics during his student years, I immediately saw the foundation for such well-grounded remarks regarding the solutions to the problems with infrastructure. For a short period of time he had been engaged in business, house order, and handicapped organisations, yet now, as Bjorn stated, his “major interests are work and family.”
That’s why, as our guest admitted later, “My favourite place in the Kyiv region is the village where my house is.” While Bjorn was vividly describing the beauty of landscapes surrounding his house near the Desna River, a question formed in my mind, which our guest eagerly answered: “I’m not a fisherman, it was always boring for me, but my father fished professionally. Though, I would like to take my son out for fishing, it’s a nice opportunity to spend time together and to talk.”
