In today’s world, although success is often measured by wealth, it takes more than money to be happy and live a fulfilling life. Of course, a teacher, police officer or firefighter can be proud of their successes even if they are notoriously underpaid. With that said, with wealth comes opportunities for the responsible person to contribute not only money but their time and concerted efforts toward helping others and making the world a better place.
Isabel dos Santos is just such a success story. As one of only two black women billionaires on the planet, she has a proven record of using her wealth and fame to make the world a better place for everybody rather than allowing herself to be corrupted by greed. Alternately, as many wealthy people have shown, perhaps they are generous and overall good people, but they spend the majority of their efforts toward their own comfort.
Isabel dos Santos is an inspiration as she has proven people can be wealthy and also a boon to society. Her career has proven her successful business savvy, and her lifestyle and morals have made her stand out as an amazing person and the hero of a generation.
Birth, Early Life and Family
Isabel dos Santos was born in Azerbaijan to Jose Eduardo dos Santos, who is the former president of Angola, and his wife Tatiana Kukanova of Russia. Although Angola was her home, she spent her early years at boarding school in Kent, England, before attending university at King’s College in London, majoring in electrical engineering.
Isabel dos Santos showed an aptitude for business skills at an early age and was fortunate to have parents who taught her about social responsibility and equality among differing sexes, races and orientations. Those two aspects of her early life have helped her balance financial success with social responsibility throughout the course of her career.
Career
First Business Endeavors
After leaving college, Isabel dos Santos began her career with Urbana 2000 as a project manager for the company, which had recently won a contract to clean up Luanda, the capital of Angola. When the project was finished, she opened her own trucking company and incorporated new technologies to increase the efficiency of logistics while also building her resume to allow for future success in the telecom industry. During this time, she expanded her value by opening Miami Beach Club, a restaurant and nightclub in Luanda.
She started Trans-Atlantic Investment Services as a means for profit while addressing the issues of the African diamond trade. She helped clean up the suspect practices of diamond mining while allowing the global diamond industry to continue producing jewelry and tools. After starting and successfully operating the business, she eventually transferred it to her mother so she could pursue other endeavors.
Unitel
Isabel dos Santos had a defining career moment as the co-founder of Unitel, the company that provides cell service and telecommunications for Angola. She felt that this technology, which she was familiar with, was an important aspect of infrastructure that could help Angolans reach their full potential in a global society. By providing the technology to share information, Angolan citizens have had a remarkable increase in opportunities as they have found the means for communication within and outside of local boundaries.
Ongoing Investments
A large portion of her wealth was earned by investing her salary into shareholding opportunities with the companies she worked for along with outside resources she found to be responsible endeavors with appropriate business plans. She began in 2008 by investing in her home country of Angola and in Portugal, where she holds interests in telecom companies, clean energy producers, retail outlets, financial corporations and media sources.
Read: https://medium.com/@suiting_up/women-in-business-isabel-dos-santos-c8fb83412953
Investments and Holdings
As a billionaire, Isabel dos Santos has too many investments and holdings to make a comprehensive list. She likely doesn’t even know what they all are because of investments employees and advisors have made on her behalf. However, the bulk of her major investments that she is personally responsible for have a few common threads about them. She is outspoken in her support for businesses that are environmentally responsible and follow moral codes toward humanitarian issues and equal rights for women and minorities. She is known to be proactive in researching and confirming such issues are being addressed before making a major investment choice, and she incorporates such policies when taking an active role in the companies she owns.
Her net worth is estimated at $2.2 billion. She has extensive holdings in Netherlands-based corporations, including Unitel International Holdings BV, and through European law holding, she maintains an interest in Sonagal, the Angolan national oil company.
She also manages a 29% majority share of Portuguese-based ZON Multimedia. She is a board member for the Angolan Bank in Lisbon and owns a 20% share of Banco Portugues de Investimento. She helped as a founding member and continues as a current board member with Banco BIC Português, which recently bought the national bank of Banco Português de Negócios.
In Angola, Isabel dos Santos has major investments in telecommunications and transportation endeavors. Other than the Unitel business, which she is perhaps the most famous for, she also owns ZAP, a satellite television provider. She owns ZOPT, a company that manufactures special purpose vehicles for industrial transportation. She has further interests in African oil and diamond industries, along with more bank share investments in Portugal and Angola as a diverse portfolio.
Como líderes, a forma como desenvolvemos o #talento nas nossas organizações diz muito sobre o que que consideramos mais importante, tanto na sociedade como no mundo corporativo. Para mim é criar oportunidades que aproveitem ao máximo o talento jovem local#Angola #emprendedores pic.twitter.com/7wEVSrbihH
— Isabel Dos Santos (@isabelaangola) July 4, 2019
Philanthropic Efforts
Philosophy Toward Responsibility: Career and Personal
In addition to her business acumen and investment talent, Isabel dos Santos has always shown an understanding of the needs of others and her responsibility as a billionaire to share a portion of her profits with the global society that allowed her to earn her wealth. It might not be uncommon for wealthy people to open a charity or donate to great causes, but they often do it for tax reasons or to maintain a positive public image. Such is not the case with Isabel dos Santos. Her intentions are pure, and she truly views the world as an optimist who believes in solutions to global problems that can, in turn, make the world a better place.
Local Aid
As shown with her early business endeavors, Isabel dos Santos invested in Angolan and African infrastructure companies and corporations, which helped advance Africa as a whole into the 21st century. Telecommunications services were vital as the internet spawned a more easily accessible global economy, and Isabel dos Santos was part of the front charge toward incorporating those services on the African continent.
Transportation logistics are also essential to industrialization. She invested heavily not just in transportation services but companies that emphasized the use of eco-friendly vehicles and techniques. Anyone with enough money to invest could have seen the opportunity for profit in Africa; Isabel dos Santos saw an opportunity to not only earn money but to invest that money in the future. Rather than taking the easy route of shipping by using older methods that pollute the atmosphere, she took the opportunity to provide clean vehicles that are up to date with the rest of the world’s efforts to fight climate change.
Empowering Women
As a successful woman herself, there is no question about how and why Isabel dos Santos promotes women’s rights and equality in the workplace. She sets an example for young women regarding the success they can achieve with talent and hard work. She will not tolerate traditional office behavior in which men take the lead without allowing opportunities for women, and she recognizes the need for input from both sexes to make the company appeal to clients of both sexes.
Equality, Diversity and Inclusion
Beyond women’s rights, she holds the same philosophy toward minorities, people of color, different worldwide religions and the LGBT community. She intuitively understands how a company has to be inclusive to attain success, and she knows that no matter how small the demographic, a company hasn’t reached their full potential if they haven’t reached out to every available resource. Such a concept not only applies to employees and clients but also to suppliers, contractors, marketing campaigns, and a general corporate environment that discourages bullying or otherwise restricting people from pursuing what they are truly capable of achieving.
Children As the Future
The solution to many of the problems Isabel dos Santos has encountered throughout her career is often found in education. Because she recognizes the need for today’s children to grow up and continue the legacy of improvement she has given the world, she provides contributions to schools and universities. So far in 2019, she has provided six full scholarships to Royal Agricultural University in the United Kingdom, in the hopes of providing the education needed to improve farm efficiency in Africa.
She further sponsors the “Seeds for the Future” program in Beijing, in which foreign college students have the opportunity to learn Mandarin and see firsthand how the Chinese business model works and affects global economic issues. She also opened the Home Kuzola in Luanda, a safe haven for homeless and impoverished children where they can receive food and clothing while attending school in preparation for a successful future rather than a life of destitution.
Sharing Her Views
Speaking Engagements
In addition to business success, Isabel dos Santos has proven her efficiency with public speaking and has shown her willingness to share her knowledge with others. Although it’s a fairly simple task to share her philosophy inside the doors of her own businesses, she encourages similar practices with other corporations regardless of whether she has a personal interest in their success. Once again, it’s important to note that she incorporated responsible business practices not only to improve her own success but because she believes such procedures can and do make the world a better place for everyone. She understands how it improves her quality of life when the people around her in the global community have similar opportunities and improve their own lives.
Creating Public Awareness
Her role isn’t limited to speaking engagements. Isabel dos Santos also engages in public awareness through writing and offering a glimpse of how she has found success and why she utilizes her efforts in the way she approaches business opportunities. She is open and available for interviews and regularly reports to news media to allow her perspectives to reach a wider audience. In spite of her busy schedule, she is easily approachable and will find time to help others with advice or simply a pleasant greeting in order to make their day better on a personal level as well as what she does for the community at large.
As a final thought, Isabel dos Santos is an inspiration, a hero and a role model. Those are titles she has earned over and above what her business and humanitarian efforts have provided for her. The news is filled with gossip stories about celebrities who were given their wealth as inheritors or child stars and the trouble they cause, but Isabel dos Santos is the exact opposite. She worked hard for her wealth and continues to do so, yet finds time to use the wealth toward projects that improve the human condition rather than demean it. Anyone who is interested in forming a successful business, providing tangible improvements to the company they are employed by, or living a socio-economic responsible lifestyle based on positive contributions to society would do well to review the choices she has made and how she has provided a new standard of excellence within today’s global culture.
Contact Isabel dos Santos
- Facebook: @oficialmente.me
- Twitter: @isabelaangola
- Instagram: @isabel_dos_santos.me
