ULAN BATOR, 24 September 2003 — Private entrepreneurs have never had it so good in Mongolia and are making the most of the former communist country’s move to capitalism.
The younger generation, many of them trained in what was then the Soviet Union, have no qualms about putting what they learned from their “big brother” to maximum use to further their careers in Mongolia’s market economy.
Lkha Ariunbat, 35, is a prime example as the head of Arigu, one of the most powerful communication and marketing companies in this poor nation, which only made the switch to democracy a decade ago.
“I’m a professional propagandist,” said Ariunbat, a former political science student at a Russian university, who became a teacher of politics in the Mongolian army during the communist era before embracing a short career in journalism and completing a scholarship in the United States.
“All that I have learned in the old system is now very helpful. I do the same work but the approach is different,” he said.
Ariunbat started his business in 2000 with two friends after deciding he wanted to broaden his career, using a small room that cost $100 a month to rent.
He now employs 25 staff and pays more than $2,000 a month rent in the same building where his expanding company now occupies substantially more space.
On the ground floor is an audio-visual manufacturing unit, one of five divisions run by the booming company.
The young, university-educated employees start at the average Mongolian wage of $100 a month but are soon earning more.
Ariunbat, as one of Mongolia’s business pioneers, has it all. Yet despite his wealth and his emergence as one of Mongolia’s modern young men he still shuns many of the luxuries considered essential by businessmen in the West.
“I don’t want to buy a car, I don’t want to use a mobile,” he said.
“I take the cab, it’s cheaper and more practical. When my employees want to reach me during the day, they know where they can find me.
“After that, they handle things. I am not involved in the details of each project, they are paid to do that and I pay their mobiles and the bills.”
Ariunbat is not the only one cashing in on Mongolia’s brave new world.
But unlike Ariunbat, Jambaljamts Odjargal, who has accumulated one of the largest fortunes in the country, not only carries a mobile phone but is happy to have his number on his business card as well.
At 38 years old, the former pupil of an engineering school in Kiev, Ukraine, is director of MCS (Mongolian Consulting Service).
In 1993, he was a modest consultant working in the agriculture and energy sectors, but today his company controls a mini-empire of diversified production and distribution activities with annual sales totaling $40 million.
Some 1,500 people work for him.
“We are the exclusive distributor of Coca Cola, Procter and Gamble, Ikea and Canon among others,” he says in perfect English seated in a vast, modern office.
His factory, which makes everything from American sodas to vodka, is similarly sparkling and oozes high technology.
Even Odjargal cannot believe how quickly his company has developed.
“This is amazing, it is going so fast,” said the well-dressed businessman, symbol of the new generation of Mongols who have rejected traditional nomadism for market forces. “Ten years ago I couldn’t have done this. But I have learnt there are no barriers to success.”
