A bus conductor who made billions by creating Red Bull

Chaleo Yoovidhya, who has died aged 88, introduced the world to energy drinks by developing the high-caffeine beverage Red Bull, and rose from poverty to become one of the richest men in the world.

Yoovidhya was born on August 17 1923 in the northern Thai province of Phichit into a poor Chinese immigrant family that scraped a living raising ducks and selling fruit. He never had a secondary education and soon moved to Bangkok, where he worked as a bus conductor before becoming a salesman for a pharmaceutical company.

During the 1970s he noticed that one of the firm's products, an energy tonic popular with lorry drivers, was selling particularly well. He decided to develop his own alternative, a berry-flavoured syrupy concoction spiked with caffeine and mysterious additives such as taurine and glucuronolactone. He called it Krathing Daeng ("Red Water Buffalo"), and set up a small company, TC Pharmaceuticals, to market it.

As Thailand began to industrialise during the 1970s, the new beverage, sold as a revitalising agent, proved popular with lorry drivers and factory workers, helping to keep them awake during long shifts.

In 1982 he met an Austrian toothpaste salesman called Dietrich Mateschitz, who had started drinking Krathing Daeng during visits to Bangkok and found it cured his jet lag. Mateschitz became convinced that the drink had wider commercial potential, and in 1984 the two men became business partners.

Mateschitz renamed the product and adjusted its flavour to suit western tastes, with added fizz. Repackaged in a distinctive slim blue-and-silver can, Red Bull was launched in Austria in 1987.

From the outset Mateschitz dispensed with conventional advertising campaigns in favour of so-called "guerrilla marketing", an advertising strategy in which low-cost, unconventional means are employed to promote a product with the objective of generating "buzz", so that knowledge of the brand spreads "virally" by word of mouth and social networking.

Deliberately blurring the lines between marketing, sport and entertainment, and under the slogan "Red Bull gives you wings", the firm sponsored "extreme" sporting events such as motocross and snowboarding competitions, as well as a flying contest in which people compete to fly the farthest over water in homemade flying machines.

Student opinion-formers and young trendsetters were paid to throw Red Bull parties or to drive VW "Beetles" with large Red Bull cans fixed on top.

Eventually the company came to own two football teams, including the New York Red Bulls. In addition it owns the Red Bull Formula 1 team which, with Sebastian Vettel, has won the world championship for the past two seasons. It also sponsors several hundred "fringe" athletes of the sort who surf in the Arctic or jump out of a plane to "fly" across the English Channel.

The result was to turn a lorry drivers' pick-me-up into a favourite tipple of streetwise youth - students, clubbers partying into the small hours and cocktail connoisseurs. Vodka and Red Bull is popular among 18- to 30-year olds in bars and nightclubs around the world.

An edgy hint of danger was part of the brand, and the occasional health scares and bans on its sale served only to boost its popularity in an expanding market for energy drinks. Red Bull is now sold in more than 79 countries, with sales in Britain alone worth more than pounds 230 million a year.

Yoovidhya owned 49 per cent of the energy drink franchise and, by the time he died, was the third-richest man in Thailand. He was ranked the world's 205th wealthiest man on this year's Forbes magazine list, with a fortune put at $5 billion. But he never flaunted his wealth, living a largely reclusive life. According to Thailand's Nation newspaper, he had not given a media interview or made any public appearances for the past 30 years.

Yoovidhya was twice married and had 11 children.



Chaleo Yoovidhya, born August 17 1923, died March 17 2012



The Daily Telegraph

201809 GMT Mar12