Hospitality tycoon Won Yip sounds the alarm for the Dutch hospitality industry
Amsterdam hospitality tycoon Won Yip is deeply concerned about the Dutch hospitality industry. Eight out of ten businesses are on the verge of collapse, he says. ‘People haven’t fully realized it yet, but things are terribly bad.’
At the Financieel Dagblad, Won Yip says he takes a few hours every day to advise other hospitality entrepreneurs. In those conversations, he hears that most businesses are in serious trouble. ‘A huge number of bankruptcies are coming,’ he says. ‘People haven’t fully realized it yet, but things are terribly bad.’ According to him, eight out of ten entrepreneurs he speaks to will have to close their doors. He calls them ‘technically bankrupt’ and ‘hopeless.’
Sorry Brad, Won lives there
Are you thinking now: huh, who is Won Yip? He made his enormous fortune in the hospitality industry, enough to buy the incredibly expensive penthouse on Amsterdam’s IJ river right out from under Brad Pitt’s nose. Yip started out in his parents’ Chinese restaurant, opened his first restaurant in Goes, and is now, among other things, the owner of the successful Amsterdam establishments Sushisamba and Majestic. So you could say he knows a thing or two about running a hospitality business.
Final blow
According to Yip, the culprit is the government’s poor communication. One in five applications for the NOW scheme at the UWV were submitted by a hospitality entrepreneur. The figures are dismal: eighty percent less revenue. ‘It costs a huge amount of money, and that’s how we create zombie companies,’ says Yip. Corona may seem like the final blow, but things had already been bad in the hospitality industry for some time, Yip says. There was too much hospitality, and ‘it was very easy to play at being an entrepreneur.’
