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Beneficiaries of the crisis
Now “mask fanatics” are talking: how two 23-year-olds made millions with protective masks
They sell expensive protective masks to the army; now, for the first time, the two young entrepreneurs from Zurich have declared themselves. And also admit mistakes.
At first there were parallel imports: young entrepreneur Jascha Rudolphi from Emix Trading poses in front of a merchandise stall.
You have achieved a dubious fame in one go. Jascha Rudolphi and Luca Steffen, both 23, founders of the Emix trading company, which last spring sold protective masks to the federal government for more than 22 million francs. The army paid the young entrepreneurs up to 9.90 francs. They bought luxury cars from the Bentley and Ferrari brands and completely ruined their reputations.
On Friday, the two sat down at a law firm in Zurich, along with their business partner, business lawyer and co-owner Peter Ackermann (62). They feel unfairly denounced in this way. They don’t deny that they made huge profits in undisclosed amounts, that’s a good way in business life. But they don’t want to overlook the fact that they are now also being accused of having sold counterfeit and unusable products to the federal government.
Then they tell how it all came about.
Emix Trading GmbH was founded in January 2016 in Uster ZH and is now based in Zug. Rudolphi made the KV, Steffen the Matura, and they had a business idea: parallel imports of branded items like Coca Cola to Switzerland. Lawyer Ackermann, a friend of the Rudolphi family, legally secured the deal. The ambitious boys supplied drinks with their Fiat Ducato kebab stands, initially earning 300-500 francs a month. His specialty, according to Steffen, soon ceased to be price. But the ability to import certain items in gray, which no one else could do. They should benefit from this ability later with the masks.
The second young entrepreneur, Luca Steffen, with branded products that Emix Trading bought on the gray market. This later became the mask business.
Sell luxury goods from Europe in China
In 2018, the two of them came up with the idea of selling European luxury goods over the internet in China. This resulted in the mask business in early 2020. The Chinese partners informed them of the pandemic, in China there would be a requirement for masks, there would be huge quantities of masks. “We explore the market for masks around the world.” They noticed that there were hardly any supplies. China quickly managed to control the pandemic and it was clear to both that Europe would need large quantities. “We had a time advantage over everyone else, that was the deciding factor,” says Steffen.
They dumped all their money, reinvested the profits, booked huge airlift capacities in advance, bought raw materials (filter fleece) in bulk because they expected a shortage. They sourced masks from around 100 manufacturers in China and established a mask testing system in China. They would have had to sort and destroy about 20 percent in China. They also lost property and money over and over again through scammers, robberies, and seizures by the authorities.
The fact that the masks were said to have been sold in Switzerland at exorbitant prices upsets the people at Emix, who ran the entire company with seven employees. Anyone talking about usury has no idea how expensive it was to produce goods in such large quantities and ship them to Europe: Emix sold about 1.5 million FFP2 masks to the federal government; According to Emix, there were a total of 250 to 300 million hygiene masks and FFP2. He also claims to have rendered valuable services during the Corona crisis. “Thousands of people died in Italy, there were almost no masks, that was the situation back then,” says Rudolphi.
Margin of 20 to 30 percent, says Emix
The margin that Emix achieved in Switzerland is a maximum of 20 to 30 percent. “We can prove that,” says Steffen. You yourself would have paid purchase prices of between 2 and 7 euros for the masks. Companies that would have delivered at lower prices at that time would have sold the remaining inventory or in-stock items that were produced before Corona. There is a dispute over the masks made by the Egyptian manufacturer Chemipharm, which Emix sold to the army in early March. According to the “Tages-Anzeiger”, they were false. Emix, who also bought these masks from a distributor in China, rejects it. As well as the accusation of having sold moldy merchandise.
The accusation stems from the fact that the Geneva University Hospital discovered Schimmel in Chemipharm masks, for which the Department of Defense (DDPS) issued a preventive recall. An investigation conducted by the University of Basel on behalf of the VBS later revealed that a health risk could be ruled out. The two are particularly opposed to the accusation of falsification of the certificate, as it was not sent to the DDPS at all.
Luxury cars and SVPs were kind of a juvenile sin
They both said the luxury car was “a mistake”. They dismiss it as some kind of juvenile sin. With the Junge SVP, to which they belonged, and with the SVP in general, neither of them had had anything to do with it in a long time.
It bothers him that it is said that they have become rich at the expense of taxpayers. His company made by far the majority of its sales in surrounding Europe, but pays taxes on profits in Zug. They both pay their taxes in Schwyz. “In this way, Switzerland got the masks for free,” says Steffen. And the boys are demanding something more for themselves: that, thanks to their parallel imports, they helped lower prices in the expensive country of Switzerland. Lindt & Sprüngli, for example, does not speak highly of them because they import their products, which are produced cheaply abroad, to Switzerland.
