Martin Vohanka: Czech billionaire who took Eurowag to London

Martin Vohanka is a Czech billionaire and the founder of Eurowag, the only company with Czech roots whose shares are currently traded on the London Stock Exchange. In a recent episode of The Forbes Show podcast, the businessman looked back on five years as a public company and explained why he sees philanthropy not as a gesture of conscience but as a sound investment.

Vohanka was born in Most, and took his company public in London — 46 years separate those two events. Today he is the only Czech whose company is listed on the LSE; before him, only Avast founders Eduard Kučera and Pavel Baudiš had managed that feat.

“In a way, I’m proud of that,” says Vohanka, recalling that he wanted to go through the entire entrepreneurial journey: from getting a trade licence to going public. According to him, most of the business case studies taught at Harvard or Pittsburgh end exactly that way — “like Czech fairy tales”: if they haven’t died, they live happily ever after, meaning that at some point the company ends up on the stock exchange.

His company Eurowag aims to completely transform the ecosystem of European road freight — a shift the founder himself compares to the move from button phones to smartphones, or from film cameras to digital ones. Eurowag’s clients are international companies that together account for up to five percent of Europe’s GDP. In Vohanka’s view, the industry’s problem is that digitalisation has largely passed it by.

The company brings together all the systems that collect and analyse key transport data onto a single platform — so that the whole interaction comes down to a driver plus an app, with almost no back office.

Eurowag’s shares have been rising lately, even hitting a record high earlier this year. However, according to Vohanka, the effects of Brexit are being painfully felt in the City of London: since October 2021, when Eurowag went public, the volume of assets under management at British investment funds has been steadily declining. “The city is shrinking, and they know it perfectly well. There’s nothing good in that,” the businessman notes.

Although Vohanka is happy to talk about business for hours, in public he is better known as a philanthropist — he has already donated hundreds of millions of crowns to charity. But, he says, this isn’t a way to “ease his conscience”; it’s a deliberate investment: “Helping others makes life more enjoyable. It’s not just you who grows, but the people around you too. It’s incredibly addictive — the most positive of all drugs.”

There’s pragmatism in this too, Vohanka believes: no business exists in a vacuum. We all depend on the ecosystem we grew out of — from education to infrastructure. If entrepreneurs don’t take care of the world around them, they may end up facing the fate of the capitalists of 1948. “We had two or three decades of relative calm, when you could focus purely on your own companies. But today it’s clear the world is definitely not okay, and we probably need to do something about that,” the businessman warns.