Global market pioneer
Felipe Stark provides "fault recorders" to three continents
The washing machine was a bargain. Buy it and take it away immediately, that much Felipe Stark knew. The only question was how. Stark decided to take the tram. Together with a friend he hauled the whopper to the stop, heaved it into the tram and dragged it to his apartment at the time in Lichtenberg. "Not a single person in Berlin said anything," says Stark, amazed at this to this day. One woman indifferently told her friend on the phone that there were people with a washing machine on the tram again. That's just Berlin: "a wonderful city," enthuses Stark.
The man ought to know, he's been to various different parts of the world in his 29 years, and lived in cities of various different sizes. He was born and raised in Belo Horizonte, capital of the Brazilian federal state of Minas Gerais, with four million inhabitants. He spent some time as an exchange student in the Texan city of Corpus Christi, with just over 300,000 inhabitants. He spent one semester studying electronics at the university in Schmalkalden, with 30,000 inhabitants. Now, the graduate engineer is sitting in a sparse room on the third floor of the founder centre in Rudower Chaussee. He has a seating area, a desk, a computer and white walls. The only decoration is a miniature bust of a bearded Greek philosopher which Stark (who says he loves Greece!) keeps to remind him of some colleagues who came from there.
From this small room in an Adlershof office, Europe, Africa and Asia are supplied with fault recorders. Here, Stark is currently in charge of two employees – even if he prefers calling himself "office manager" to "boss". This is also where they screw the fault recorders together, in an adjacent room. Square, flat, black boxes covered with a huge range of cable connectors. The device is used in substations – it shows the electricity flow, registers faults and determines the source of errors. It was developed by a small electronics firm in the south of Brazil, which chose to open two foreign offices in 2010 to conquer the global market. So Stark came to Adlershof, at the start just as a lonely pioneer.
He is now living in his fourth apartment in Berlin and has acclimatised to life here. Brazilians are now the minority in his friendship group, and now he's found a manioc flour supplier he doesn't even have to go without his beloved pão de queijo. Pão de Queijo, literally "cheese bread", is a speciality of Minas Gerais. The dough is made of manioc flour, cream and cheese. In Brazil, a special hard white cheese is used to make it. In Berlin, Stark has discovered that it also works with grated Emmental. His business trips have already taken him as far as Taiwan. It is only Unterensingen in Baden-Württemberg that he has yet to visit from Berlin. That's where his grandfather emigrated to Brazil from in 1920.
by Winfried Dolderer