Career
Logothetis started working at his father's shipping company, Lomar Shipping, in 1993 at the age of 18.[17] By 1995 he was CEO of the company. Over the next ten years, he enlarged the fleet from less than five to more than 55 ships.[3]
Logothetis's philosophy from the start was to work hard, and then take three to five months off every five years to reflect about the next five years.[18] During these hiatuses, he avoids work emails and phone calls, believing that "ideas need space to be born".[3][19] On his first sabbatical, he travelled around Asia, and on his second, he did some university studies in New York City.[3]
During his three-month sabbatical in New York, the idea of diversification came to him.[3] In 2003 Logothetis, with his brother Constantine, created and founded Libra Group, based in New York and London, to diversify and expand his company.[3]
Between 2004 and 2007, during a boom in the shipping business, Libra Group sold off most of Lomar's ships.[20] With the profit from the ship sales, the new company purchased a fleet of airplanes, which were at a cyclical low, and set up an aircraft leasing division, Lease Corporation International.[3] Logothetis repeated this successful "buy-low, sell-high" formula of going counter to prevailing market trends several times in the ensuing decade, building a large diversified multinational conglomerate out of what was once a small shipping company.[4][20][19]
"The idea behind Libra was to diversify away from shipping to create a global group, using the top lieutenants we had worked with in the preceding years", Logothetis told Reuters in 2013.[20] He told Fortune he "took all the great people from our shipping business, and sent them around the world to start companies. We ended up with a ship's captain running a $200 million real estate company and a Russian fruit seller who runs six biogas plants in Latvia."[21] He later reiterated to BBC News how he expanded and diversified the company: "'We designed a framework of all the places in the world that we wanted to have an office and representation in. Next to each place we put the name of a person that we knew – a family member, a friend or an employee.' These people were sent out to different locations and given the chance to learn new businesses."[3]
In 2006, Libra Group started expanding beyond aviation. Its new major ventures included real estate, hotels and hospitality, and renewable energy.[3][22]
In December 2009, after ship values slumped in the wake of the financial crisis, Logothetis again entered the shipping business and purchased Allocean and its fleet of 26 ships.[4][23][24] From December 2009 through December 2014, the company purchased a total of 91 vessels.[25]
Libra Group has also expanded beyond its core businesses of maritime, aerospace, real estate, hotels/hospitality, and renewable energy, to include a variety of diversified investments such as media, rare earth minerals, and sleep products.[26][6][13][7][27] Between 2008 and 2014, the company purchased $7 billion to $7.5 billion of assets globally.[27] As of 2023, Libra Group owns and operates 20 subsidiary companies around the world.[20][6]
In 2024, Libra Group announced that the Group had exited the container shipping market after selling close to 100 vessels for more than $2 billion over several years to focus on innovation and sustainability as new drivers of growth.
In 2023, Libra formed a new aerospace subsidiary (SLI) to tap into the projected $1 trillion space economy.[28] Libra Group aims to become the world's first space leasing company offering satellites, spaceports, and other infrastructure. Libra is setting up a station in the Alaskan Arctic, vital for polar orbits to monitor climate change.[29] In April 2024, SLI purchased a second ground station in Piteå, Sweden.[30]
Logothetis has been an advocate for and an investor in Greece during the Greek financial crisis.[3] As a result of the crisis, he has become a sought-after business leader for his opinions on investing in Greece and in Greek assets, products, and industries. In June 2012, following prime minister Antonis Samaras's election, he emphasized that the promise of governmental stability was bringing back business confidence and individual confidence in Greece, and noted Libra Group's numerous recent and projected Greek investments and businesses.[20] In March 2013, he cited Samaras's coalition government's relieving the Greek eurozone crisis as a reason investors were returning to, and should continue to return to, Greece.[20] In late 2013, he sounded a cautionary note concerning the "buying frenzy" occurring in the slump-ridden shipping sector.[31] Speaking to a reporter in January 2014 at Davos, he encouraged businesspersons to see the opportunity available in Greece, and stated that he felt that 2014 would be "the year of Greek growth".[2][32]
