KONTRAX Irodatechnikai Rt.

7123'92 Rental of office machinery and equipment, computer equipment

5140'92 Wholesale of miscellaneous goods

5243'92 Retail sale of electrical and telecommunications products

7250'92 Office and computer repair and maintenance

7414'92 Business consulting

7499'92 Services supporting economic activities not elsewhere classified

5190'92 Foreign trade

7430'92 Advertising activities

Office supplies, photocopiers, telephones, switchboards, faxes, Yellow Pages business phone book, other office equipment products

With the change of regime, the Hungarian economy was also freed from previous restrictions. Companies could be founded freely, and the newly emerging needs were often no longer met by the former state-owned companies. This gave a number of private companies business opportunities. Kontrax supplied office technology solutions: they sold photocopiers, telephones, telephone exchanges, fax machines, but they also published the Sárga Lapok business telephone directory at the time.

The company commissioned the team led by Péter Molnár (Ádám Sylvester, Tamás Vaja) to design the central office building and warehouse in 1990. The client wanted a solid building that expressed the image of the developing company, and that would also solve the storage problems. The headquarters turned out to be a remarkable structure for that time: all glass, not only for useful square meters, and in front of it on a small platform the company's name was displayed in large letters, like in American movies.

On December 5, 1991, Kontrax Telefon Rt. participated in the founding of the First Pesti Telefontársaság, Budapest and also the country's largest established, enterprise-based telephone company.

The company flourished in 1992, when it was in its heyday, and then on May 5, 1993, by the time the headquarters was actually completed, the Kontrax group, with a book value of 2.5 billion forints, filed for bankruptcy with a debt of 5.4 billion forints. Work on the First Pest Telephone Company began, and it was promised that by the end of 1993 all those requesting telephones would receive a telephone exchange. Towards the end of 1993, practically only a few hundred new telephone exchanges were connected to the new telephone exchange that had been built due to the company's collapse. The company's remaining real assets, the majority of its foreign subsidiaries, were acquired for $1.5 million by Jim Sowell Co. of Texas, which had been left in the lurch in the HungarHotels case.

The sales network of Kontrax Irodatechnika Rt. is unique in Eastern Europe, and its reconstruction would cost $5 million, according to our calculations – this is how Texas entrepreneur Jim Sowell explained on Tuesday why he invested $1.5 million in Kontrax Irodatechnika Rt., which was threatened with liquidation, based on the contract signed on May 2. As a result of the recapitalization, Sowell, which primarily deals with real estate, acquired 51 percent ownership of Irodatechnika and – apart from the one in Prague – he also owns the majority of all foreign subsidiaries. Both Sowell and President Gábor Dicső consider the liquidation of Kontrax Irodatechnika to be “almost inevitable”. In its heyday, in 1992, the company, which employed a thousand workers and had a turnover of 7 billion forints, had a turnover of 2 billion forints in 1994, the number of employees was still over 300, and it had 36 representative offices in 6 countries.

A blog author wrote the following:

Kontrax is memorable to my generation because they were the first to have TV commercials that we felt were Western, and they all featured a good woman, not one that at first glance looked like the granddaughter of the CEO of the company that commissioned it.

I must say that I visited the central building only once and saw Windows there for the first time in my life (they took us there from the course that was otherwise held in Újbuda to show us this).