Beautiful, sunny, Mafia-run Sicily is probably the least likely place in Europe one would think to find information technology entrepreneurs. Even less so in that extremely old world region would one expect to find such an entrepreneur to be a woman. Nevertheless, on the arid plains of Sicily, 65 miles equidistant from Palermo and Catania, Jepssen Italia SpA has risen to challenge both of those perceptions. A product of Catania’s exclusive religious school Sacred Heart, Jepssen’s founder and chief executive Marina Taglialavore was prompted to establish the company for largely personal reasons. Her religious education instilled a strong interest in southern Italy’s social problems; in particular, the difficulty of her fellow Sicilians to find work. Throughout the 1970s and early 1980s, Ms Taglialavore dreamed of founding a company and creating employment, in a region where jobs were rapidly disappearing and entrepreneurial initiatives were virtually nonexistent. Then she took a trip to Taipei in the early 1980s, just as the personal computer craze began to take hold in Italy. In Taiwan, she discovered its overwhelming industrial dynamism and, in particular, Jepssen Enterprise Corp, one of the country’s largest manufacturers of personal computers and peripherals. As a result, she returned to Sicily with more than the usual souvenirs, with a project to realise her dream by setting up Jepssen’s subsidiary in Italy.
Thought her crazy
The project became reality in 1988. In the company history, she writes that she did it to demonstrate that it could be done, to herself, but above all to those who underestimate the entrepreneurial potential in southern Italy, especially if the entrepreneurs are women. Ms Taglialavore’s fellow Sicilians must have thought her crazy. She established a female management team and set out to compete in the savage market of personal computer sales with a strategy as foreign to Sicilian culture as sun-bathing is to Eskimos: aggressive telemarketing. The chief executive says, however, that she believed from the beginning in telemarketing’s potential to acquire new clients, follow their daily problems, keep them up to date with new product information and discuss market developments and their own ever-changing needs. To date, it appears that she has won her bet. Founded in Agira, in the province of Enna, the company recently transferred to a more prestigious address in Enna’s Dittaino Industrial Park. Through nearly 800 sales agents spread throughout Italy, Jepssen Italia markets a range of iAPX-86-based personal computers from notebooks to servers, including a line of multimedia boards called M-PC Total Project. The factory in the Dittaino valley produces the majority of the MPC Total Control multimedia boards, and the boards Expander, RX, Sensor, as well as some image and sound capture boards, she said. Jepssen Italia buys all of its microprocessors and mass memory drives, from floppy to CD, directly from component manufacturers, while motherboards, SuperVGA video boards, monitors and shells come from the Taiwanese parent and are assembled in Sicily. The company also has a network of OEM customers that buy either components or sub-assemblies already prepared for customising systems. While final 1995 turnover figures were not yet available, Ms Taglialavore said they should be up about 35% over 1994. Last year, she adds, was a truly exceptional year, both for our financial results and our public image. Jepssen’s 1994 turnover doubled over 1993 to $3.3m Some critics might discount Ms Taglialavore’s achievement, saying it is only the subsidiary of an Asian company and only an assembler of other companies’ products. But aside from the mere fact that she has created a successful business from a region where few thought it possible, Jepssen has also undertaken to introduce specific configurations of its personal computers to stimulate the market, such as the MPC Sensor, a system for measuring the human body’s state, including blood pressure, heartbeat and temperature. Not bad for a traditional Catholic woman from Catania. – Marsha Johnston
