Dickran Ouzounian is the fourth generation of his family at the helm of Toyota on the island. THEO PANAYIDES meets a man keen on giving back, and hoping to bag a Guinness world record next week
Next Sunday, a week from today, something quite unusual is scheduled to happen at the GSP Stadium in Nicosia. A few hundred cars, maybe as many as 500 – but no fewer than 427, at the very least – will form the Cyprus Car Parade, an attempt to set a new Guinness world record.
Ranged in a line, with no gaps between them (the whole thing will be filmed, to provide documentary evidence), the cars will drive from the GSP towards the Latsia flyover and back again – a distance of around 4.5 kilometres – never breaking formation or allowing other cars to come between them. Given the logistics, which of course will require stewards and police support, it’s a bit surprising that anyone is eligible to take part, regardless of their driving skills – but it’s true: anyone who owns a Toyota, whether new or used, is welcome to turn up at 10.30am and add their car to the automotive conga-line, trying to break the record of 426 cars currently held by Toyota Denmark.
A Toyota? Yes, that’s the point. The record in question is the world’s longest line of Toyotas, and the event’s taking place to mark 50 years of Toyota Cyprus – which is partly why I find myself on a Monday morning in the company’s showroom in Engomi, waiting for a secretary to usher me in and watching a salesman deep in conversation with a customer (or potential customer) while I wait. The customer is a simply-dressed man in his 60s, with faded jeans and a weathered, workman’s face. He seems fairly keen but money, as usual, is an issue. “Here’s the best I can do…” says the salesman, and names a price. For a moment, I wonder if that really is the best he can do; the car industry, after all, has been badly hit by the economic crisis. In 2008, almost 29,000 new cars were sold on the island. In 2013, that figure was 7,400.
Those figures are vouchsafed to me later by the man I’ve come to interview, Dickran Ouzounian, head of Toyota Cyprus for the past 25 years. I’d assumed the corporate offices would be separate from the showroom but in fact they’re in the same building, just a few feet from where salesmen haggle with reluctant buyers. I’d also assumed that Dickran’s own office would be slightly set apart, maybe at the end of a long corridor, but in fact the secretary stops almost immediately, knocks on a nondescript door and waves me into a medium-sized office where Dickran, trim and silver-haired with an earnest expression, gets up to greet me. There’s no wasted space; a desk and a conference table fill up most of the room. There’s a cluster of trophies in a corner, a reminder of Toyota’s three-year involvement in the Cyprus Rally in the early 90s – one of the first projects he initiated “to try and enhance the brand, especially among the youth” after he took over.
He was young himself in those days, having become Managing Director at 24 (he’s now 49); one could even say he was born into the job, lending an accidental edge to his words when he calls himself “the first employee” at Toyota. The first distributor agreement was signed in 1965, a year before he was born – but in fact the company which signed that agreement was founded in 1896, and its name is Dickran Ouzounian Co. Ltd. It was founded by another Dickran, the great-grandfather of the man sitting in front of me, an immigrant from Armenia who made metal bedsteads (most Cypriots still slept on the floor, on straw pallets, at the time) and water-well pumps, then started importing Raleigh bikes – the Toyota of their day, or close enough – in 1908. It’s been passed down from father to son ever since, the current Dickran representing the fourth generation of Ouzounians.
What does it feel like to be born into the bosom of such a venerable business, with an obvious implied responsibility to carry on the tradition? It wasn’t like that at all, he demurs: “I never had pressure from my father or grandfather to join the business”. Indeed – in what may have been a masterstroke of passive-aggressive reverse psychology – his parents didn’t even keep him in Cyprus, sending him off to boarding school in the UK at the age of 11 (it was his choice, insists Dickran, his sister having already gone to England a couple of years earlier). The school was Mill Hill in North London; he sat the entrance exams and was lucky to be admitted – “I wasn’t the best student in the Junior School [in Nicosia], I must admit. I was a lively boy, apparently!” – and the school changed his life, teaching him to stand on his own two feet. “I was initially not a leader,” he recalls, but slowly became more active, especially in sports: he was Head of House, school captain in rugby, hockey and tennis, and even played Eton Fives, a strange esoteric squash/handball hybrid played with a cork ball.
After school, he stayed in London (even now, his English is fluent and with hardly any trace of an accent), studied Law and passed the Bar exam – but then, at the moment when aspiring barristers start their pupillage, the siren call of Cyprus and the family business began to sound in his ears, drawing him back. Whether his dad’s secret plan had always been to send him abroad so he’d return of his own volition can never be known – but he has no regrets, he insists more than once, though “the first transitional years” back in Cyprus were difficult and he still misses the bright lights of London occasionally.
More essentially, it may be that the family business – and all that it entails, including the particular detail of being an Armenian in Cyprus – goes “through my DNA”, as Dickran puts it. He talks of his great-grandfather, whose family nearly died before finding refuge here in the 19th century; clearly, the old stories of adversity and suffering played a part in shaping the kind of person he is. I note that his extra-curricular interests include not just tennis, cycling and windsurfing but also the Rotary Club of Nicosia (he’ll be club president from July 1), dedicated to social service and raising funds for assorted charities. More than once, he talks of being as “charitable as possible” and “giving back what you get from the community”. If Dickran saw the 119-year-old business purely as a business, it might’ve been easier to walk away and do his own thing. The fact that he seems to view it as something grander – a potential force for good, providing for its 110 employees and society in general – may explain why he ended up as the fourth generation.
The fact that Toyota is a Japanese company also played a role. “I’ve been moulded by the Japanese culture, I would say,” he muses – a culture that believes in long-term planning, rewards loyalty and abhors change; a culture, in short, that fully endorses the idea of a business passing, in orderly fashion, from father to son. “Some people may call it more conservative,” he says of the low-risk, consensus-based approach favoured by the parent company. “Some people can’t perform this way… Maybe they want to have more flair, and be more individualistic and risk-oriented. Unfortunately, in a business where you’re representing a global brand like Toyota, you can’t do that”. The upside, of course, is a useful buffer when things go wrong. “Two senior Japanese executives at the highest level arrived in Cyprus within a few days of the Eurogroup decision” in March 2013; even in the depths of post-haircut gloom, he knew that “we had a colossus that was standing by us, if anything did go tragically wrong”.
That was still a bad time, though, easily the worst time of his 25 years at the helm – and it’s not really getting much better. “It’s beginning to recover very, very slowly,” he says of the market: sales of new cars were around 9,000 units last year, and projected to be about the same in 2015 (they did see an increase in the first few months of this year) – “[but] we’ll never get back, for the next five to 10 years I don’t think we’ll ever get back to the levels of 2008”. Indeed, he adds wryly, the numbers they’re selling now are roughly the numbers they used to sell in 1980, six years after the invasion.
Did they not see it coming? “I think we saw it coming, but not the tsunami that came,” he replies thoughtfully. Danger signs were everywhere, “we had too many people who wanted to be entrepreneurs in Cyprus” – and of course it made no sense for so many people to be buying so many new cars with so many bank loans. Fortunately, Toyota managed to avoid “very aggressive” measures (i.e. mass layoffs), though some jobs were lost and costs were slashed across the board; it was also “an eye-opening year” for him personally, muses Dickran. “I’ve learned a lot from this experience. I’ve learned to be tougher, it’s toughened me up more. I’ve learned to make difficult decisions, which I’d say I didn’t have the confidence to take in the past”. For a while, in 2013, “the whole viability of our sector came into question”. Even now, in 2015, it’s obvious that changes must be made if the country’s going to recover, from reforming the “public machine” that’s sucking the rest of us dry to solving the Cyprus problem – though “I’m not a politician, and I don’t like to talk about politics” – to attract investment and unlock the lucrative oil-and-gas sector.
Some would call Dickran Ouzounian’s life doubly charmed, or at least doubly protected – once because he was born into a thriving, prosperous family business, and again because that business was part of a gigantic global player that could offer even more security. Such people might view his recent setbacks, working in an industry that’s seen its sales shrink by 70 per cent, as a kind of cosmic backlash for his good fortune – but in fact his life seems to have blossomed in the past few years, even in the midst of professional strife. He’s more active than ever, having gone back to sports after many years (he tries to play tennis twice a week, and “I like to play quite competitively”), but has also become more philosophical, no longer feeling every mistake as a visceral pain in his chest like he did in the early years of his career. He also got divorced in 2008 – the year of the 29,000 new cars – and has since discovered life after divorce with a new partner, “a very dynamic lady [who] gives me energy”.
And what of the family business – that elephant in the room, the looming entity founded by the other Dickran Ouzounian in an unrecognisable Cyprus a century ago? Will there be a fifth generation? Dickran has two boys, now aged 16 and 14; he hasn’t repeated his father’s trick – if it was a trick – of sending them to boarding school, but insists he’s not putting pressure, just as no pressure was placed on him. Yet he worries deeply about the new generation, growing up in a digital world with short attention spans, too much information and online relationships that often become superficial: “The communication they’re doing on a daily basis,” he frets, “how will that mould them as adults?”. One has to wonder if the old stories – the trek from Armenia, the family’s various vicissitudes – will make the kind of subconscious impact on his boys that they made on him, or whether they’ll just be smothered in digital noise. Great-grandpa Dickran wouldn’t recognise this world, even with his company still in it.
Maybe it’ll all end with Dickran, the fourth generation; he claims to be happy with that. “I’m running the company as if I’m transient through the business,” he tells me. “So I will deliver this business, hopefully, as best as I can, either to my own children or to other directors, or to other independent managers. And that’s my role here. That’s how I genuinely feel.” In the meantime he does his best to sell cars, give back where he can, and live a useful, active life. A Guinness world record wouldn’t hurt, either.
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