Samir Mane fled Albania’s communist regime in the early 1990s and resettled in Austria where he made his first fortune. Now back in Albania, he oversees a real estate and retail empire stretching across the western Balkans and beyond.
On a sunny October day in Albania’s capital, Tirana, Samir Mane beams as he walks through his Tirana East Gate Mall, a 1.2 million square foot temple to capitalism with international brands ranging from Adidas and Swarovski to Burger King and KFC. The largest mall in Albania, it’s indistinguishable from the sprawling, glass-and-steel shopping complexes in any major European city—and that’s the point.
“This is our flagship asset. It’s 100% leased,” he boasts, rattling off a list of tenants, including apparel sellers H&M and Zara plus Albania’s first sushi restaurant and several of his own businesses, including a clothing retailer, a toy store and a consumer electronics chain. “People want to be able to touch the products. We have every tangible business in Albania.”
Dressed in a dark blue blazer over a black Lacoste polo, Mane could pass for one of the shoppers strolling around on a Monday morning. But the 57-year-old tycoon is Albania’s first—and only—billionaire, the richest person in this small Mediterranean country of just 2.8 million people. Thanks to his investments in retail, real estate and banking, he’s built a $1.4 billion fortune, per Forbes estimates, earning him a place on Forbes’ 2025 World’s Billionaires list. It’s not something he ever expected as a 23-year-old refugee fleeing Albania’s communist regime in 1991. “I never thought that was possible. My dream was to have my own house or to have a car,” he says.
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Now, his conglomerate BALFIN Group operates in 10 countries and recorded a net profit of $120 million on $880 million sales in 2024, up 31% and 14% from 2023, respectively. About 62% of revenues come from retail, followed by real estate with 20%, banking with 9% and logistics and asset management making up the rest. Mane owns all of it, but he has brought in partners in his malls, retail chains and real estate development projects.
His imprint is visible throughout Albania’s capital city, where he has lived since returning to his home country in 2005. He owns Tirana Bank, Albania’s fifth-largest bank; his Neptun electronics chain is the largest in the country; and he owned the largest supermarket chain until he sold it for $48 million in March. Riding through town in his black Mercedes-Maybach SUV, he points his driver towards Rolling Hills, a luxury residential complex he built where he also owns a 33,000-square-foot villa.
“I bought the land in 2008, it was very cheap at the time,” he says, looking out at an expanse of 153 neoclassical-style villas with views of the surrounding Skanderbeg mountains. Land values in the area have risen more than tenfold over that time, and Mane has kept building. Next door is another Balfin-owned development, Collina Verde, and Mane has another under construction by an artificial lake that’s expected to cost $240 million and will be complete in 2028.
“Nobody, not even my father, believed it would work.”
Mane’s fortune doesn’t stop at Albania’s borders. He owns retail stores throughout nearby Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo, Montenegro and North Macedonia, including Skopje East Gate, the largest mall in North Macedonia. Beyond the western Balkans, he’s also started investing in apartment buildings and offices in Austria and Canada plus New York and New Jersey.
Explaining his approach, he points to lessons he learned reading books by American business icons like former longtime General Electric CEO Jack Welch: “Welch said you need to be diversified. Albania is small, so we thought, why don’t we go into other countries and other industries?”
Mane was born in 1967 in the southern Albanian city of Korçë during the reign of Enver Hoxha, the country’s long-ruling communist strongman. Domestic travel was highly restricted, and Mane rarely left his home city until he went to university in Tirana at age 18, where he studied geology.
“I didn’t choose geology. It was the Communist party that decided what you studied,” he recalls. During his college years, Mane would buy meat to make meatballs and sell them to students to make some extra cash—until, six months into his side hustle, the authorities stopped him. In 1991, while still a student, he decided to flee the country to seek a better life. He got an Austrian visa from a travel agency and took a 36-hour, nonstop bus ride to Vienna, where he registered as a refugee. (He later learned that the visa issued by the agency was fake but no one stopped him.)
He spent more than six months in a refugee camp, studying German on his own, until he became good enough to apply to the Technical University of Vienna to continue his geology degree. In 1992, Albania’s communist regime collapsed. “Albania opened up a bit and people were coming to Vienna to buy electronics. So I saw an opportunity,” he says.
He dropped out of university in 1993 and started translating for some exporters before getting into the business himself. That same year he set up a business called Alba-Trade, which bought video recorders, radios, TVs and household appliances in Austria and shipped them to Albania. He would load the trucks himself and then make the two-day road trip from Vienna to Tirana, sleeping in the truck to save money and protect the goods. He’d find a spot in Tirana, park his truck and customers just showed up. “We sold all [the goods] in the truck in three hours,” he says. “But in Austria, I saw that it was possible to sell products in a proper way in shops.”
To understand the business, Mane read books not only by Jack Welch but also Walmart founder Sam Walton. “One of them taught me how to run the retail business, and the other taught me how to run a corporation,” he says.
When Mane’s Tirana East Gate Mall opened in 2011, it instantly became the largest shopping mall in Albania.
BALFIN Group
He opened the first Neptun store selling TVs and home appliances in Tirana in 1996. Two years later he expanded into North Macedonia and then to Kosovo, Serbia and Montenegro, becoming one of the first outsiders to enter those markets as the new countries emerged from the breakup of Yugoslavia in the early 1990s.
“He’s a visionary at having the right concept at the right time. He identified the need for appliances in the western Balkans when we didn’t have washing machines,” says Edlira Muka, BALFIN’s CEO. Mane’s success also mirrored the economic boom in those countries as they shifted to capitalism: “He represents one of the biggest conglomerates in Albania and it’s a sign of the economic growth and the change the country has seen,” adds Martin Mata, co-CEO of the Albanian-American Enterprise Fund (AAEF), a nonprofit investment fund established in 1995 to help Albania’s transition to a market economy.
By the early 2000s, Mane had built a consumer electronics empire across the western Balkans, with 19 stores and $50 million in revenue, sourcing most of his goods from Asia. But seeing the success of Western brands and shopping centers in post-communist eastern Europe, he thought he could do the same in Albania. In 2005, he moved his family from Vienna to Tirana to launch the country’s first shopping mall on the outskirts of the capital.
To anchor the mall, he needed a grocery store. So Mane traveled around Europe meeting the heads of supermarket chains to convince them to open stores in Albania. “They said, ‘Mr. Mane, we see the GDP figures. Nobody’s coming.'” he recalls. (Albania’s GDP at the time was just $8 billion, compared to a current $24 billion.) “So I decided to open a supermarket chain myself. I hired a French guy from Carrefour and built the first modern grocery store in Albania.”
It was an ambitious move. At the time, more than 30% of Albania’s economy was informal, working in unregulated industries that didn’t pay taxes. Mane needed to convince legions of consumers to convert to Western-style capitalism and shell out for goods at a mall rather than at neighborhood markets.
“Nobody, not even my father, believed it would work,” says Mane. “They said, ‘Why should someone drive two hours to buy tomatoes?’” At first, Mane struggled to find investors, and even funds that have since backed him were skeptical of his plans at the time. “We were not convinced,” says Aleksandër Sarapuli, the AADF’s co-CEO.
Mane eventually convinced the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, a Paris-based development bank, to invest $15 million in debt and equity financing for his grocery store. In October 2005, he opened Qendra Tregtare Univers (Univers Shopping Mall in English) in Tirana, with a Neptun electronics store and the first outpost of his Euromax grocery chain. The roads were packed with cars on opening day and Mane jumped in and directed traffic in the small parking lot. “For all the skeptics, we had thousands of people waiting on the highway,” adds Steven Grunerud, BALFIN’s Canadian chief financial officer, whom Mane hired in 2007 from Austrian bank Raiffeisen to professionalize his business.
When Mane later decided to open the even larger Tirana East Gate mall, he had proven his concept and won over more investors than before. “He didn’t pretend to know how a shopping mall is run, but he took expertise, followed the model and listened to people who knew how to do it,” says the AADF’s Mata, who estimates the fund tripled its investment when it sold its stake in the mall back to Mane in March.
Mane built on that success by taking an ever greater role in Albania’s economy. Many of the investments have panned out: He bought Tirana Bank in 2019 and 2020 from troubled Greek lender Piraeus Bank for $64 million, and the bank, with $1.7 billion in assets, is now worth an estimated $155 million. Other ventures haven’t been as successful. Mane picked up Tirana-based financial news network Scan TV in 2022 but sold it a year later at a roughly $2.2 million loss.
His wealth has also brought greater scrutiny. In October, Albania’s Special Anti-Corruption Prosecutor (SPAK) arrested former Albanian President Ilir Meta on alleged corruption charges. Mane—who has not been charged with any crimes—was reportedly cited in the documents as having offered Meta and his then wife Monika Kryemadhi, a member of parliament, a villa in the Rolling Hills complex worth just under $1 million (Meta has appealed his arrest and Kryemadhi has denied the charges.)
“If you are a prominent businessman in Albania, you have a very strong connection to politics. It’s not surprising that Mane had this connection to Meta,” says Afrim Krasniqi, a professor of political science at the University of Tirana.
Mane categorically denies the accusations, calling them “unfounded and proven false by the Albanian authorities” and says he never had a close personal relationship with Meta. “I have never in my life been investigated, accused or prosecuted, not for this matter, nor for any other,” he adds.
Mane’s Green Coast luxury real estate project, which features hotels and villas, is located about an hour’s drive north from a development in the works by Jared Kushner and his private equity firm Affinity Psrtners.
BALFIN Group
In the rough-and-tumble world of the Albanian economy, Mane prides himself on not entering the political arena or benefitting from the privatization of state-owned businesses in the 1990s. “I’ve never been in politics and it’s not my intention at all,” he says. “I never took part in any privatizations. In ex-communist countries, if you’re rich, the people consider you an oligarch. But I built my wealth in Austria and I came back.”
Mane is now looking to expand even further in eastern Europe. He’s planning a new franchise of Jumbo, a Greek toy store chain, in Moldova. And he’s adding other brands to his empire, signing a deal with Danish variety store chain Flying Tiger Copenhagen with plans to open 50 stores in the next four years.
But he still sees promise in his home country, with international tourism as a potential game-changer for Albania’s economy. He owns Green Coast, a luxury development on the Adriatic Sea that’s slated to feature hotels from international brands including Accor, Grand Melia and Hyatt plus 2,600 villas and apartments. The first phase of the project, which is expected to cost $900 million to build overall, opened in 2022 and Mane has already raked in a nearly $150 million profit from property sales.
“It’s an amazing project, we’re going to do very, very well there,” says Mane. But he’s not the only one eyeing Albania’s untouched Mediterranean beaches, which rival those of nearby Croatia—without the crowds. Dubai real estate billionaire Mohamed Alabbar is developing a $2.5 billion luxury resort and superyacht marina in the north, while Donald Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner and his private equity firm Affinity Partners are planning a $1.5 billion luxury development on the island of Sazan in the south.
For Mane, the more investment in his country, the better. “I like the projects, I hope they do it. It’s going to be amazing for Albania,” he adds. More visitors from overseas means more customers for his retail stores and more potential buyers of his villas. “Retail, real estate and tourism. That’s our future.”
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