Background
Sugar was born in Hackney, east London, into a Jewish family. He is the youngest of four children of Fay (1907–1994)[13] and Nathan Sugar (1907–1987). His father was a tailor in the garment industry of the East End.
When Sugar was young, his family lived in a council flat. Because of his profuse, curly hair, he was nicknamed "Mop head", a name that he still goes by in the present day. He attended Northwold Primary School and then Brooke House Secondary School in Upper Clapton, Hackney, and made extra money by working at a greengrocers.[15] After leaving school at 16,he worked briefly for the civil service as a statistician at the Ministry of Education. He started selling car aerials and electrical goods out of a van which he had bought with his savings of £50.
Education
He was born as the youngest of four children to Jewish parents Nathan and Fay. His father worked as a tailor, and the family was poor.
He went to Northwood Primary School before enrolling at Brooke House secondary School. His business skills were apparent from a young age—even as a school student he started working for a green grocer to earn some pocket money.
He left school at 16 and started a small business of selling car aerials and electronics. His earnings soon exceeded those of his father’s.
Career
Naturally blessed with an acute sense of business acumen, the young man started his own business, Amstrad, in 1968 when he was just 21 years old. It was originally stared as an export-import and wholesale company with the name AMS Trading (Amstrad) Limited. The company soon branched out into consumer electronics.
By 1970 the company began its manufacturing unit as well. Over the decade it became one of the foremost marketers of low cost and high quality electronics like television and car stereos. He used new and innovative techniques in the production process which helped the company to cut costs considerably.
Amstrad went public on the London Stock Exchange in 1980 and doubled its growth during the early 1980s. The Amstrad PC range was introduced in 1984 in an attempt to capitalize on the surge in demand for personal computers during that time.
The company brought out the PC models PPC512 and 640 in an attempt to bring affordable portable computers to the market in 1988. These computers ran MS-DOS on an 8 MHz processor.
In spite of registering tremendous growth during the 1980s, the company ran into hard times during the 1990s. Amstrad introduced the GX4000 in 1990 in an attempt to enter the video game console market but it was a commercial failure.
Amstrad produced the Amstrad Mega PC, a system similar to the Sega TeraDrive in 1993. The system was however priced very high and therefore was not much successful. The company’s attempt to release the PenPad was also a commercial failure.
In spite of having no knowledge about the game of football, he teamed up with Terry Venables to buy Tottenham Hotspur football club in 1991. He treated the club entirely as a business investment and not as a sporting venture. This made him highly unpopular with the fans and he sold off the club to leisure group ENIC by 2007.
Amstrad decided to focus on communication technology in order to reinvent itself as a profitable concern. During the early 1990s they purchased several telecommunication businesses including Betacom, Viglen Computers and Dancall Telecom.
Amstrad started making profits again as a major supplier of set top boxes to the U.K. satellite T.V provider Sky. The company was the only one producing receiver boxes and dishes at the time Sky was launched and thus Sky became their biggest client.
He has appeared in the BBC reality show, ‘The Apprentice’ since 2005. In the show, he fires a candidate each week until just one is left. The winner is employed in Sugar’s company or wins a partnership with him to establish his own business.
In 2007, Amstrad was sold to the broadcaster BSkyB for about 125 million. BSkyB had been Amstrad’s biggest client over the past several years.
He also founded several other business ventures including Amsair Executive Aviation, Amsprop, Viglen Ltd., and Amsreen, many of which are today run by his sons.
Religion
Lord Sugar is an atheist, but remains "proud" of his Jewish heritage
Politics
In February 2009, the Evening Standard journalist Andrew Gilligan claimed that Sugar had been approached to be the Labour candidate for Mayor of London in 2012. Sugar subsequently ridiculed the claim in an interview with The Guardian. But, during Prime Minister Gordon Brown's cabinet reshuffle on 5 June 2009, the BBC reported that Sugar would become Lord Sugar and had been offered a job as the government's "Enterprise Champion". On 7 June 2009 Sugar sought to clarify the non-political nature of his appointment. He stated that he would not be joining the government, that the appointment was politically neutral, and that all he wanted to do was help businesses and entrepreneurs. In August 2014, Sugar was one of 200 public figures who were signatories to a letter to The Guardian opposing Scottish independence in the run-up to September's referendum on that issue.
From 1997 until 2015 Sugar was a member of the Labour Party and also one of its largest donors. On 11 May 2015, four days after the United Kingdom general election, 2015, he announced that he was leaving the party. He issued a statement to say:
In the past year I found myself losing confidence in the party due to their negative business policies and general anti-enterprise concepts they were considering if they were elected. I expressed this to the most senior figures in the party several times. I signed on to New Labour in 1997 but more recently, particularly in relation to business, I sensed a policy shift moving back towards what Old Labour stood for. By the start of this year I had made my decision to resign from the party whatever the outcome of the general election.
Views
1. “Not everybody needs to go to university; they can get out and start working straight away.”
2. “Money is all right but once you have it you learn it’s not the be all and end all.”
3. “The entrepreneurial instinct is in you. You can’t learn it, you can’t buy it, you can’t put it in a bottle. It’s just there and it comes out.”
4. “Why work when you can fill out a few forms and get paid for doing nothing?”
5. “Put your loved ones, not your profit margin, centre stage.”
6. “It’s never a good thing to be seen to be rushing to conclude a deal.”
7. “Don’t worry if you make mistakes because that’s how most people learn.”
8. “In America, everybody thinks they’re an entrepreneur. That’s the problem. It’s not a title that anybody should call oneself.”
9. “I’ve spent my business career giving good value for money, and I hope never to deviate from that ethos.”
10. “Self-belief is a critical skill for business success.”
Connections
He married Ann Simons in 1968. The couple has three children and shares a happy married life.
Children The Hon. Simon Sugar
The Hon. Daniel Sugar
The Hon. Louise Sugar