About Holger Crafoord

• the Man
• the Industrialist
• the Philanthropist

When Holger Crafoord joined the staff of Åkerlund & Rausing (ÅR), he began a long working relationship with Ruben Rausing that was to make ÅR a leading European packaging company and lead to the creation of Tetra Pak.

As early as 1939, at the age of 31, Holger Crafoord was appointed deputy CEO of ÅR, and the post of CEO became his a few years later. His big personality, all-round knowledge and experience, ability to take constructive initiatives, decision-making capacity and willingness to take responsibility, combined with an unprejudiced and unconventional approach to problems were examples of qualities that made Holger Crafoord an outstanding business leader. He had also become a 25% shareholder in ÅR.

During the post-war years, the selling of groceries became more and more based on self-service, resulting in an ever increasing need for factory-packed goods.

These years also saw the birth in ÅR's laboratories of the concept that would become Tetra Pak.

The project was a real uphill battle for many years before a breakthrough could be discerned in the mid-1950s.

The financing of the tetrahedron project became extremely onerous for ÅR, and Holger Crafoord's task became very much a matter of securing funding despite the worries of the lenders. For many years, Holger Crafoord was also deputy CEO of Tetra Pak and had a large shareholding.

In 1965, Rausing and Crafoord decided to dispose of their ÅR holding. Negotiations were carried out by Holger Crafoord, who successfully sold the company to Svenska Tändsticksaktiebolaget. He was also appointed a member of the board of this company and later became the vice chairman of the board.

At a time when most people would have chosen to retire - Rausing was then 70 and Holger Crafoord 57 - Rausing decided to concentrate exclusively on Tetra Pak. Holger Crafoord had another project of his own that would now demand his full attention, Gambro.

At a dinner, he had happened to discuss renal failure with professor of urology Nils Alwall and learnt that the illness could be combated if resources could be made available for dialysis, i.e. artificial blood-purification.

This in turn required that a functioning disposable filter, an "artificial kidney" could be used. Normally, chronic renal failure otherwise led to death - at that time acute renal failure could only be treated for a short time.

Holger Crafoord committed himself to the project immediately. He funded the extremely risky development work with his own funds, and five years later the first disposable kidney could be used on a patient. 1968 saw the introduction of the dialyzer, the filter, on a wide scale in Europe, and production plants in Germany, the USA, Italy and Japan followed in rapid succession during the 1970s. A complete dialyzer plant was also sold for production under licence in the then Soviet Union.

A rapid expansion of the marketing organization was carried out in parallel with this. Sales companies were established in Germany, Switzerland, the Netherlands, the UK, the USA, France, Italy, Canada and Belgium and more would follow.

It was not only a matter of making a dialysis filter that was cost-effective. Dialysis treatment also required advanced monitoring equipment. Gambro developed such equipment, too, and became an extremely fast-growing, cutting-edge hi-tech company. At the same time, new products were developed in other medical disciplines. Holger Crafoord was equally interested in all of them.

In the spring of 1977, Gambro caught the attention of the business world in a big way. This was the first time that the company presented financial figures that showed breathtaking results. In the business magazine Affärsvärlden's annual profitability list for 1976, Gambro occupied first place with more than 30% return on capital employed.

Holger Crafoord died in 1982, but Gambro lived on. In 1983, the company was introduced onto the Stockholm Stock Exchange with an initial public offering that was one of the most over-subscribed in the history of the Swedish exchange. At the same time, the need for a new principal owner became ever more evident and the Sonesson group in Malmö stepped in as a new principal interested party. The Crafoord family and the Foundation still retained a controlling holding.

The original Sonesson holding passed via Volvo to Investment AB Cardo, which in 1994 was bought up by Incentive AB. In 1995, Incentive in turn made a bid for all outstanding Gambro shares and both the family and the Crafoord Foundation disposed of their shares, bringing the interest of the Crafoord family and Foundation in Gambro finally to an end.

Today, Gambro is integrated with what was previously Incentive AB. Further acquisitions have been made and the company is one of the world's biggest in fields that include dialysis and dialysis treatment.