“I came to Israel to find a place to invest 1 billion euros (about 1.4 trillion won) in Koreans, who are called ‘Jews of Asia.’”
Ofer Yanei (48), chairman of Nofar Group, a renewable energy company that ranked second in Israeli market capitalization at the time of its initial public offering (IPO) in 2020, visited Korea and gave an exclusive interview with the Seoul Shinmun on the 29th. Chairman Yanei, who visited Korea as an Israeli economic envoy even during the war against Hamas, said, “We invest 1 billion euros in Europe every year, and I came here to look for a place to invest the same amount of money in Korea.” Currently, Nofar Group is conducting renewable energy business across seven countries카지노사이트, including Europe and the United States.
Born to a Tunisian refugee father and a Syrian refugee mother who immigrated to Israel in the 1950s, he rose to become a successful entrepreneur by starting a business and was selected as one of the ’50 most influential Jews in the world’ this year by the local media, The Jerusalem Post. Those named with him include Mark Zuckerberg and Sam Altman.
Chairman Yanei founded a startup called ‘Go4Eat’ in 2001, long before the food delivery service ‘Uber Eats’ was launched, but it failed. Afterwards, he entered Ben Gurion University’s Graduate School of Business, took a lecture on ‘The Future of Renewable Energy’, and founded Nofar Energy in 2011. In the early days of establishing the company, he ran a solar power project for two years in the moshav, a farming community on state-owned land, but experienced frustration as he failed to persuade officials. Afterwards, the same business model was applied to kibbutzim (cooperative farms) without government regulations and achieved great success.
After the outbreak of war with Hamas on the 7th, 80% of Nofar Group’s male employees and 20% of its female employees were mobilized to reserve forces. He confessed, “Germany asked, ‘Will you be able to meet the delivery date?’, but I answered that our smart women would work instead of the men who served in the war and would keep the time promise.” Chairman Yanei explained, “Israel, which has the highest startup-to-population ratio in the world, actually increased investment in startups even during the war against Hamas,” adding, “It is Israel’s long-standing tradition to maintain its economic system even during times of war.”
Regarding this war, “Israel, which was founded in 1948 with a population of 6,000, has won all five wars against Arab countries. “After the war, the population has increased and the economy has become stronger,” he said, adding, “All citizens are confident of victory.”