Andy Gatesy is incredibly proud to call Malta home. “The island has become such a special place to me,” he says. “It’s where I choose to live and to run the business, and I love living here.”

As Chairman and CEO of Toly – one of the largest companies on the island, with over €100 million annual turnover – Andy has certainly made his mark on Malta. It is a legacy he took over from his father, who first came here in 1969, and one that he continues to grow with gusto today.

“My father Zoli was a toolmaker in England in the 60s, having left Hungary as a refugee in the 50s,” Andy details. “His business was growing at the time and he had set up a factory, but it was the ‘winter of discontent’ and he was aware that things were changing in the sector there. So, when a friend of his suggested he consider Malta – which was looking for foreign investment back then – he said ‘let’s try it’!”

That was the start of something truly fantastic for Zoli and his company. In 1970, he was given his first local factory in Bulebel, and he started manufacturing just a year later. “The island was very different back then,” Andy recalls fondly. “There were just two international phone lines – so you had to wait for one to be free if you wanted to make a call. Plus, the whole area was rural, with just goats in the fields for miles around and no infrastructure at all.

“But my father was a pioneer and he wanted to make it work, so he did. He employed 40 people and got stuck in, and that’s where the successes started – and they haven’t stopped since. We now lead the Toly world from right here. We take the Maltese spirit we love so much, and implant it across the globe.”

And the Toly world is no small fry. Today, the company employs over 1,100 people across factories and offices in Korea, China, the US, and more. The business celebrated 45 years of operations in Malta in 2016, and expanded further in 2018 with the launch of its new, stateof-the-art factory, where it creates a vast range of solutions and services that cater to the needs of any cosmetic company in the packaging industry, big or small.

Andy has been at the helm of the business since his father sadly passed away in 1991. His official title is Chairman and CEO, but he prefers to refer to himself as ‘chief disruption officer’. “One of the things I am most passionate about is disrupting our organisation, largely because if we don’t disrupt ourselves, then one of our competitors (or the industry at large) will do it for us. While it isn’t always the popular route, I have to be impatient, otherwise the organisation won’t move forward. I am the engine that drives everything, but I have a fantastic executive team who then helps to move it forward.”

Clearly it is a strategy that’s working, as Toly hit its target of €50 million in sales four years ago, and then smashed its 2020 target of €100 million in sales two years ahead of schedule. “It’s been an amazing achievement for the team,” the CEO smiles. “It all came down to successful expansion – as we took our core business in the creation of make-up compacts and diversified into so many other types of products and packaging for the whole cosmetics and skincare market. In the past, our top 10 clients made up over 80 per cent of our business, but today they make up just 45 per cent, which gives us so much more strength to manage the inevitable peaks and troughs. Things change: two years ago, make-up was booming, now skincare is booming. Either way, we are ready to react to anything that is thrown at us.”

Nevertheless, Toly does face its fair share of challenges – including how best to tackle the cultural and practical shift towards a more environmentally-focused approach. “Our new factory is a very modern, eco-friendly building, so a lot went into preparing our workforce for the differences that that would bring,” Andy explains. “Plastic has become a very dirty word – and not always for the right reasons. After all, it isn’t a bad material; it’s the way we dispose of it and the fact it is ‘single use’ that’s the problem. Thus, there is now a massive push in our sector internationally to make things reusable and refillable, and we are extremely focused on achieving that for our clients.”

Speed to market is another challenge for Andy, as he explains there has been more change in the sector (and in the world) in the last three years, than in the previous 30. “Customers have become impatient. Today, if you want to order a taxi, you press a button and if it’s not there in five minutes you get upset. Much of the world now follows this order, and you have to have an adaptive business model to balance that.”

He explains that very few privately-owned businesses still exist in the packaging sector, as most have been sold to private equity firms, which means their vision is very different to the Toly ideal. “For them it’s all about money,” Andy continues. “As a privately-owned business we are focused on the long term. And the future looks positive, with the industry on track to grow five-to-seven per cent in the next year, which gives us a lot of legroom for growth.”

His plan, in fact, is to keep stepping things up and scaling things up. “We’ve hit €100 million, and our next major milestone will be to double that again: to hit €250 million by 2025. It’s not going to be easy as, to do it, we need to achieve 15 per cent growth each year. But we have managed a 17 per cent annual compound growth rate for the past four years, so I am positive.

“That said, we will not grow at the expense of losing our soul. If we grow and lose our passion and family spirit along the way, then we will have made a huge mistake. If, on the other hand, we grow two-to-three per cent a year and love what we’re doing, then we will have been successful.”

As for Andy’s theme for 2020, he says that this is clear: to make a positive impact, the Toly way. “We want to positively impact our people, our customers, our stakeholders, and our communities – and we want to achieve all this while creating and launching innovative products we can be very proud of.”

Whoswho.mt is proud to be serialising MaltaCEOs 2020, a high-profile publication consisting of 50 in-depth interviews with leading CEOs in Malta.