Felix Abt is a serial entrepreneur. He worked as a senior executive at multinational corporations such as the Swiss-Swedish ABB Group, a global leader in automation and power technologies; the F. Hoffmann-La Roche Group, a global leader in healthcare and the Zuellig Group Inc., a leading Asian distribution and trading group. He also worked with smaller and medium-sized enterprises, in both mature and new markets.
Thus far, he has lived and worked in nine countries, including Vietnam and North Korea, on three different continents.
His basis for going abroad was to learn and observe, not to pass judgment and not to propagate his personal views or to lecture – or even “liberate” – other people.
He is glad that he could gain experience in capacity building, by organizing and carrying out a diverse range of training courses, from Spain to Egypt to Ivory Coast to North Korea and Vietnam. He was pleased to see a number of his former employees in these countries become successful entrepreneurs in their own rights.
He also became a lobbyist (against all odds) as president of the first foreign chamber of commerce in North Korea, advocating for reforms and a level-playing field for all businesses and against strangulating sanctions by foreign powers.
His biggest disappointment in North Korea was that his pet project, electrifying North Korean provinces far from the capital to lift millions of North Koreans from poverty, was thwarted by the actions of foreign powers.
His biggest satisfaction was to have contributed to the prevention of accidents and to save miners' lives by helping to modernize North Korean mines and to save countless more lives of North Korean patients thanks to locally made quality medicine at affordable prices, before foreign-imposed sanctions sabotaged these endeavors.
Felix Abt was a shareholder of several legitimate Joint Venture companies in North Korea (medicine, food, garments and software) which have been driven into bankruptcy by U.N. "sanctions" from the mid-2010.
Abt considers himself a politically neutral businessman and, therefore, does not share partisan views about North Korea but wants to contribute to a more objective view of the country.
To try and balance a one-sided narrative he has written not only ‘A Capitalist in North Korea’, but also a second book ‘A Land of Prison Camps, Starving Slaves and Nuclear Bombs?’