ARTICLE CONTENT
John Graf
- Born:03 January 1947 in Vienna
- Function: Founder and owner of Novomatic GmbH
- Education: 1970 Completed apprenticeship as master butcher
- Assets: 4.8 billion euros
From butcher to slot machine importer
Johann Graf is a real self-made billionaire. He grew up in modest circumstances with his grandparents in Vienna-Döbling and completed an apprenticeship as a butcher at a young age. At 23 he was Austria’s youngest in 1970 master butcher and began to work in his parents’ business, an inn with a few guest rooms and an attached butcher’s shop on the market square in Perchtoldsdorf near Vienna.
But he was really into slot machines, and especially the pinball machines that were very popular in the early 1970s. So in 1974 he founded Brodnik & Graf GmbH with his friend Gerhard Brodnik and started Import pinball machines for restaurants. In the trend interview in 2007, Graf said:
I always wanted to be self-employed because that gives me a certain independence and freedom. I was interested in technology, but my parents insisted on training as a butcher. So I went to business school and became the youngest master butcher in Austria. Soon after, however, I tried my hand at a completely different profession. I started importing pinball machines with my friend Gerhard Brodnik, who had an electronics store and from whom I later broke up. I really knew nothing about slot machines and hadn’t gotten any further than football wuzler, but at least we had our own company,
Trading in the machines soon turned out to be a very lucrative business. And Graf was soon able to give up his job as a butcher, say goodbye to the family business and concentrate entirely on importing and selling slot machines.
Graf to:
We were lucky and soon got representation from an English company called JPM, at the time the second largest independent manufacturer of slot machines. Before that we had imported American pinball machines via Belgium. A second stroke of luck was that exactly at that time, around 1975, there was a technological leap in slot machines, the switch from electromechanics to electronics. The manufacturing factories got into huge problems because their people didn’t know anything about electronics. That was an opportunity for us. I hired electronics specialists and offered our services. At that time I flew to America and looked at factories. I was interested to see what’s behind the scenes, visiting manufacturers all over Europe and flying all the way to Australia for slot machines.
The founding of Novomatic
In 1980, at the age of 33, Graf took the next and decisive step in his professional life. He started his own company, the Novomatic Automatenhandels GmbHwith which he die slot machines no longer import, but self made wanted to. It was the cornerstone of what is now a global company empire.
However, the beginnings were very modest. Graf receives:
We started very, very small. It was tedious and difficult at first. We had to turn every shilling five times. Starting capital was my savings: around 50,000 schillings. At the end of the seventies we started to produce our own billiard tables. A carpenter in Upper Austria built them, we bought the coin units in Italy. We sold to wholesalers and we have already installed a few machines that we operate. The first person who took pity on setting up one of our billiard tables was a cafe owner in Vienna’s 16th district.
Johann Graf’s Rise and Expansion
The rise of Novomatic was unstoppable, especially since Graf die “Quality over quantity” philosophy followed and made sure that his machines were really mature and worked perfectly before he put them on the market. As early as 1982, the company started to expand abroad: Graf founded a sales company in Switzerland. The Novomatic founder:
We were the first to put vending machines in course rooms. In truth, our home market was not Austria, but Switzerland: We could deliver there and also operate vending machines ourselves. England and Germany also became home markets for us. Of course, they didn’t wait for us, and it required great innovative strength, which made us stronger overall.
But the real turbo for the further development of the company was that Step to Eastern Europe. Novomatic took advantage of the opportunities in the CEE reform countries at an early stage and also found employees there to drive product development forward. In Kraków, Graf has been one for that Research and development center for software development founded.
Novomatic AG, which he still controls alone today, grew rapidly. And Graf soon got to the point where he could say: “After a certain point, money is no longer important personally.”
“I’ve certainly been lucky in my life, although of course it wasn’t just luck. Apart from health, you also have to work for luck. Nobody will help you with that.”, emphasizes Graf, who avoids slot machines himself. “I’m not a gamer. I would be like an innkeeper prone to alcoholism” he said in the trend interview from 2007.
He remained a successful businessman and continued to build his global corporation, which today operates around 1,200 electronic casinos, casinos and sports betting shops with more than 200,000 slot machines in over 32 countries.
Founded in 1991 Subsidiary Admiral Sportwetten has 200 branches in Austria alone. And even in distant Santiago de Chile, the entrepreneur opened a casino with his own slot machines – which turned out to be an excellent investment.
life as a billionaire
In purely arithmetical terms, the Novomatic founder was soon worth a few billion euros, but that didn’t really interest him that much. In the trend interview from 2007 he knew how to tell: “The money is in the company. I lead a relatively normal life and as such have never found it necessary to take large sums of money out of the company. What we do is accumulate and reinvest. This is how a company can grow successfully.“
Of course, Graf also has his hobbies, and one of them is his passion for Jaguar cars, which has grown into a collection of around 120 Jaguars.
The self-made billionaire largely avoids publicity and is considered a very reclusive entrepreneur. Johann Graf only rarely gives interviews and tells information about his life and his successful companies. He prefers a life away from the hustle and bustle of the media and prefers to keep important information to himself.
Graf is at home in the Lower Austrian city of Baden near Vienna, but since the “Ibiza scandal”, the media turmoil that followed and the allegations against him and his company, he has preferred that Second home in Florida in the USA.
Thomas Graf, son and successor
Johann Graf has three sons, one of whom the eldest son, Thomas Graf, has been with Novomatic for 30 years, is the Chief Technology Officer there and will one day take over the company. In 2021, Johann Graf already handed over 20% of Novomatic GmbH to Thomas Graf. Thomas already runs the company as a manager and will take over after a “generational change” together with Johann Graf’s long-time companions, Birgit Wimmer and Ryszard Presch
Criticism and controversy about Johann Graf
In 2020, the billionaire’s generosity led to Investigations by the Austrian public prosecutor. He was accused of private large gifts of money to relatives to have done. The investigations revealed that around 160 donations of money must have been made, many of them amounting to millions. However, Graf made it clear through his lawyer that all donations were made privately and without any consideration and that every transaction was reported to the responsible tax office.
Also due to the “Ibiza scandal” there was massive criticism of Novomatic AG. In 2019, the former Novomatic boss Franz Wohlfahrt confirmed that large sums of money would be transferred to the BZÖ bogus bills to have transferred. However, the ex-boss has not yet been charged.
Since this incident, Johann Graf has not been on good terms with Austria. He describes the allegations against him and his colleagues as unacceptable and said goodbye to himself and his company from Austria. He now runs Novomatic far away from Austria and his media from Florida.