The Founder
The Entrepreneur
The entrepreneur
At the end of the war Italy was defeated and in need of everything. Iosif Constantin Dragan sensed the economic potential of such a situation and, on the 13th of December 1948, he founded the ButanGas Spa company, which specialized in bottling and distributing Liquefied Petroleum Gas or LPG.
As a matter of fact, since then, ButanGas has made its mark on the LPG market, becoming one of the leaders in the field. In Italy, ButanGas operates in the entire country through an extensive distribution network, reaching each potential user countrywide, including the islands and rural areas.
Owning its two coastal depots (Porto Torres and Naples, the latter with a storage capacity of over 18 thousand cubic metres), and with an equity in the railway terminal at Domegliara (VR) and the IPEM coastal warehouse at Brindisi, his company – which Iosif Constantin Dragan created from nothing –, has been guaranteeing to its users an ongoing supply of LPG for over 60 years, with a punctual and efficient service importing the product by sea.
ButanGas Spa distributes LPG in bottles and cylinders for domestic use and small industry and trades extensively in the field of combustion and traction.
The success of ButanGas Spa in Italy convinced Iosif Constantin Dragan to invest in other European and non-European countries as well. He began trading in Greece and Morocco (1953), and then in Germany (1955), forming the initial hub of present-day ButanGas Dragan Group, an international player with locations in several countries (besides Italy, Greece, Austria, Germania and Morocco it is present in Romania, Poland, Bulgaria, Albania and Serbia) with an extensive distribution network delivering bottles and cylinders daily to tens of thousands of private clients, industries and public institutions alike.
The Development of Marketing and Academic Positions
Meanwhile he moved to Milan from his beloved Rome. Later he called it “the economic capital of Italy” in contrast with Rome, “the capital city of Italy”. Milan became the heart of his activities, the means to express his cultural personality and his trading and entrepreneurial ability in full, his access to the rest of Europe. Hereon he developed and affirmed his multi-faceted personality. Besides confirming his success as industrialist Iosif Constantin Dragan, made regular cultural contributions in several sectors of knowledge.
In the early 50’s Doctor Dragan became an active member of the European League of Economic Cooperation, and represented its Italian chapter at numerous international conferences including the one in Paris in 1952 and the Brussels Monetary Conference in 1953.
In 1954, he became a member of the promoting committee for the creation of an Italian Marketing Association aiming to establish and spread throughout Italy distribution and market research studies. With this in mind, Doctor Dragan, as a member of the Italian delegation, developed contacts with the United States. In that same year with professor Guglielmo Tagliacarne and other economists and scholars, he was one of the founders of the Italian Association of Marketing Studies. The Association, of which Iosif Constantin Dragan became Vicepresident, was instrumental in the establishment of the International Marketing Federation (IMF), in 1961 under the auspices of the State Department of the Foreign Operations Agency in the United States, the Interministerial Committee for Reconstruction and the National Committee for Productivity with the initial participation of delegations from 13 European, American and Asian countries. Within the International Marketing Federation, Iosif Constantin Dragan was appointed Vicepresident for Europe and Africa in 1966 and later on during the general meeting in April 1970 in Washington, he was elected president of IMF itself.
In the field of Economic Theory he made a relevant contribution, organizing seminars and conferences (notable among them the one in Timişoara, in Romania, being the first to be held in what was then a socialist country, during which he spared no effort for the introduction of Marketing as a scientific academic subject) and later contributing to the creation of numerous similar Marketing Associations in Greece and in Spain.
He also greatly contributed to the development of international trade relations as an active Member of the International Chamber of Commerce and, in particular as the founder of the Italo-Romanian Chamber of Commerce (1973), which in time became an important trading reference point between two countries that boast a common Latin origin.
Meanwhile Iosif Constantin Dragan was the recipient of many academic awards: he was appointed Associate Professor in Marketing and Applied Economics by the Academy of Studies in Bucharest; Visiting Professor by the University of Timişoara; Visiting Professor by the City University Business School of London and Member of the Science Academy of New York for his scientific studies and for promoting the “Precessional Heliothermal Calendar” as well as a new theory regarding cycles in civilizations, in his work Geoclimate and History.