BBC World Service Interview with Nasa Khan Nasa Khan, the Chairman of TAP, as the company is internationally known, is just 30 years old and was just 22 when he launched out on his own with $3,000 to invest.
A teacher once confided that on starting out in the profession she was advised the more keys you accumulate the more senior and eminent you are. Nasa Khan, by virtue of his over-burdened key ring, is a very important man.
This is the sound that greets you when you go to the headquarters of The Accessory People, manufacturers of covers, chargers and other additions to mobile phones sold around the world. Pop music vidwos run throughout the day on large and small screens around the offices. So from the minute you step inside you know this is a business run by, and for, the young. Nasa Khan, the Chairman of TAP, as the company is internationally known, is just 30 years old and was just 22 when he launched out on his own with $3,000 to invest. Now the son of Pakistani immigrants controls an enterprise with a turnover of over $400million, his own fortune is put at over $30million. I managed to get him away from the non-stop music to talk about his earliest memory of doing business. "I was a child, and I was in the nursery schools, and we were selling little diaries, and buying them for 50 pence and selling them for a £1, and we knew where to get them from and no-one else did. It was as simple as that - buy and sell - a case of supply and demand."
Nasa Khan, 30, (and 751= in the main ranking) is chairman of The Accessory People, a supplier of mobile phone and palm-top computer accessories. The son of a Surrey bus driver, he borrowed £2,000 from friends to open his first mobile phone shop, launching The Accessory People in 1995 in Chessington. The company is now worth £35m. Khan thanks his parents for instilling in him an ethos of "ambition, drive and determination". His business is growing fast and recorded a profit of £2m on sales of £320m in 2002. Khan, above, has an 85% stake worth £30m. Last year he was named Entrepreneur of the Year in the National Business Awards, the Oscars of the enterprise world, for his "exceptional vision and leadership". He is using his rapidly increasing wealth charitably, with donations totalling more than £250,000 in the past year, £225,000 of which has gone towards educational causes. At a local level, he has put more than £23,000 into supporting the Kingston Little League, a football competition for juniors in southwest London, close to Khan's home base. Khan has a property portfolio in the UK and overseas worth £12m and other assets.
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