Badalyan Brothers
About the Company
This is not a story of ordinary circumstances and sudden, accidental success. It is the story of a life tempered in the crucible of hardship and turned into achievement, and of people who built a miracle with their own hands. It is the story of a conscientious doctor in a small town — respected, skilled, a man who saved lives and treated thousands — whose good name became the foundation of his sons’ honourable lives, helped them find their feet, and passed down from one generation to the next a set of values in which honour plays the leading part equally in dealings with partners and with employees, and which inspires an unhesitating trust in them.
Badalyan Brothers: the story of a family business whose beginnings reach back to the independence of the Republic of Armenia and run alongside the country’s own history, through its descents and its ascents alike.
Picture a situation in which chaos and uncertainty are everywhere, confusion and collision: the vast empire called the Soviet Union, of which Armenia was a part, was collapsing, and our country and our people — sunk in economic collapse, in ethnic conflict, in problems at home and abroad — had to get back on their feet, or rather begin to walk unaided, in order to secure their place and their role on the international stage.
It was precisely then, in the 1990s, that a doctor who enjoyed universal respect and affection was at work in one of our homeland’s regions, in the district of Talin: Dr Romik Badalyan. Through his tireless work he had become a living legend of the region, so high was the standing he held. People’s particular reverence for Romik Badalyan had been formed by his living faithfully by the oath of Hippocrates. Modest by nature, accessible to everyone, caring more for the health of others than for his own life, he saved many lives and treated thousands.
Guarding his back and inspiring the men of the family stood a caring, beautiful, tactful and well-read woman: Anahit Badalyan. A teacher of Armenian language and literature, she is in her turn a gifted educator. She walked her husband’s road with him, shared the bitterness of life and its joys, raised children of use to their country, and instilled the values of a family. Endowed with a wisdom of cosmic scale, this woman has held everyone together by her love and her devotion.
The doctor’s son
The doctor’s elder son, Vahe, saw from his teenage years that alongside his selfless work his father kept running into bureaucratic wrangling of every kind, which raised artificial obstacles and embittered his life.
Vahe Badalyan — whose constructive cast of mind and decisiveness were to become the foundation of a large family business — sensed with a natural shrewdness that enterprise is what drives an economy, and that he had to start a business of his own. On leaving school he entered the Medical University in order to become a dentist, so as to stay clear of the instructions of assorted superiors, to act independently, and to be no one’s subordinate. Vahe chose dentistry because at that time only its practitioners had the right to work independently, on their own account.
At home he had always heard that his paternal grandfather had been a successful businessman under Tsarist Russia and had lived in the village of Haghartsin, near Haghartsin Monastery — until the Bolsheviks dispossessed him as a kulak.
Two books he read on his mother’s advice also had a decisive influence on his decision to go into business: Mór Jókai’s “The Man with the Golden Touch” and Paul Vialar’s “There Is No Time Even to Die”.
From 1989 he was in business.
An entrepreneur’s instinct meets a stereotype
In 1990 they registered their first legal entity: the Katoghike production cooperative. Katoghike is the name of the seventh-century church in Talin.
I liked that church. Our house was right beside it and we played there. It was closed at the time; later we restored it. My father was very much against our going into business — he said it was shameful. Under the Soviet Union there was a poor attitude to enterprise, and trade in particular was not thought respectable; but I set out to prove the opposite, through my work, to a father who had given his whole life to medicine.
After the USSR came apart, in 1990, land and credit were being given to cooperatives. On 6.5 hectares beside the Talin highway the Badalyans tried to establish an orchard. Various entrepreneurial ideas began to be put into practice; some succeeded and some did not, but a large and lasting enterprise had already been set in motion.
The decisive, risky step: the petrol business
On 10 October 1992, on Vahe Badalyan’s initiative, the Badalyans opened their first petrol station. At the Talin crossroads, where they sold petrol, they put up a two-storey building so that a restaurant and a games hall could operate alongside it; those never opened, because the money ran out. They had to take loans and develop the petrol business instead, buying the fuel in Russia and Georgia.
Before long the Badalyans decided to stop reselling goods bought at second hand and to import from Russia themselves. So began a hard line of work, full of dangers of every kind. The post-Soviet territories were chaotic and ungoverned at the time. Armed criminal groups roamed the country, ethnic hatred set off clashes in domestic life as well, and people, large consignments of goods and vehicles disappeared without trace; the atmosphere of impunity gave rise to fresh abductions and fresh lawlessness.
I was very anxious whenever they went on those long journeys. I did not sleep at night; I wept. Often, when I heard a lorry passing our house, I would run down and ask the drivers: my husband and my son are bringing petrol — please tell me, have you seen them, has anything happened to them? They would say: no, dear sister, we saw them, they are coming along quietly. Perhaps they had not seen them at all, but they said so to spare me. I was in pieces until they arrived.
It was in those conditions that the Badalyan brothers became the first supplier of petrol in Armenia. They kept the population in fuel, and four principles were built into the round-the-clock running of their stations: never cheat anyone on the litre; never mix anything of poor quality into the petrol; keep petrol and diesel available around the clock; and never raise the price artificially — indeed, sell a little below the market.
The Badalyans took their greatest profit from petrol in 1993, after fuel prices were liberalised in Russia. They managed to open a second station on the Armavir–Gyumri highway, and then a third on the Ashtarak road. The free market showed what it could do.
The doctor’s connections and standing — a pledge of good name and trust
My brother Vigen and I ran the business, but my father’s standing helped us a great deal. Thanks to his connections we struck profitable deals. When we were starting out, the respect people had for him counted for a great deal. They trusted us.
A widening view, a widening business
Having laid the foundation of a large business, Vahe Badalyan did not confine himself to a single field but set out to diversify it. He travelled to the Arab Emirates and studied the business environment there. He was drawn to the electronics trade, which was still uncommon in Armenia at that time. Technological progress was bound to take the world, our country included — but throughout all of it Vahe Badalyan was thinking about creating a bank of his own.
The idea of having a bank went back a long way, but for one reason or another — the starting capital, the paperwork — it kept being postponed. Even so, on 1 April 1994 they opened an office in Yerevan at 37 Abovyan Street, where a branch of Fast Bank stands today, and founded three businesses in it: a pawnshop, a currency exchange and a jewellery shop. And once again the working style of never cheating the customer and never betraying the fair rules of the game made slow but steady progress.
The taste of chocolate from the old days
Vigen and Vahe Badalyan also built a chocolate import business. Once the pawnshop was running they opened a wholesale flagship shop on Koryun Street for well-known chocolate factories. There was as yet no local production, and customers came to that shop confident that what they were buying was genuine and unadulterated. In an Armenia bearing the weight of the post-Soviet economic disaster, under blockade, only just coming round after the fighting, it was a “sweet” place where affordable prices and high quality let people taste real chocolate and buy something safe for their children. The shop closed later, when unscrupulous operators created unfair conditions of competition.
The entrepreneurial mind did not flinch at that. Among the Badalyans’ successful ventures was shoe manufacturing in the 2000s, whose output sold well abroad. Later, as the times demanded, the family’s by then steady business projects were reshaped and relaunched.
The Caucasus tavern, always good and always welcoming
In 1996, on Vahe Badalyan’s proposal, the family bought the premises of what is now the Caucasus tavern, on Yerevan’s Hanrapetutyan Street — formerly Alaverdyan Street. The tavern opened on 26 March 2003. The capital itself, like this family business, was in a phase of development, and there were few restaurants in the central district.
To this day the Caucasus gives the centre of our city its flavour and its colour. With its incomparable food, the range of Caucasian cuisine, its striking ethnic music, an interior that never tires the eye, and guests of many nationalities, it is permanently in the sights of tourists and of locals alike.
We worked together, always listening to the elder. That hierarchy worked in our family, and the truth was invariably born out of the disagreement. Everything has happened in this business — advances, problems, and beginning again. So these are perfectly normal processes. In everything there was a principle, laid down by my father, Romik Badalyan, and by my brother Vahe. It was the principle of honesty.
Vivaro
Alongside the opening of the Caucasus tavern, Vahe Badalyan was thinking of founding a sports bar and beer house where, as well as watching sport, people could place bets. In those years the only bookmaker in Yerevan was Eurofootball. At first they wanted to be a distributor, but permission was refused. That became the spur to open a bookmaking company of their own.
In 2003 they obtained an operating licence and began inviting programmers, writing software, retraining staff, and gradually taking a part in “the big game”. In bringing information technology to Armenia, too, the Badalyans were among the first in the country. Vahe Badalyan ran the administrative side and Vigen Badalyan the operational one.
Our company brings together what is innate in a person’s handling of life as a game: logic, the soul, and attachment to one’s native soil. In a single sentence, that is how this life is described.
Fast
The Badalyans’ business plans did not stop there. The financial world was setting new challenges. In 2004 the pawnshop was renamed Fast Credit. On Vahe Badalyan’s proposal it became, in 2011, the Fast Credit credit organisation, on the basis of which Fast Bank was in turn created.
The bank that took three decades
In 2022, three decades on, the central aim was realised: Fast Credit received a licence for banking activity and became Fast Bank. The banking business is moving ahead at speed.
In 2017 a licence was obtained for the Fast Credit business in Great Britain as well, and Fast Credit is developing there too.
The Caucasus complex
Besides the tavern, in 2007 the Badalyans began building the Caucasus restaurant and hotel complex on the Ashtarak highway.
The Vbet domain
In 2004–2005 the Vbet domain was acquired. It was a crucial step for Vivaro. The chief quality of the Vbet.com brand is that it is easy to remember. A person has only one letter to remember — the letter V. Everyone knew bet.com, and that single letter turns into the sign for victory: V for Victoria. Remembering it becomes easy.
At first they worked with various countries on a B2C basis, through intermediaries; but with the problems that could arise in mind, on Vahe Badalyan’s proposal they founded in 2011 their first software company of their own — SoftConstruct as the legal entity, and BetConstruct as the sales brand. In the expanding era of information technology, and in the gaming system in particular, it is developing very fast.
On Vigen Badalyan’s initiative the slot games Pascal and Popok were created. BetConstruct has branches in several dozen countries and is known throughout the world for service that is high in quality, fast and profitable.
An indivisible trinity
All of it has been the result of the work of the three of us, and this is a most important point: without my father none of it would exist, without me it would not exist either, and without Vigen it would not exist. All of it is the result of the three of us working equally.
SoftConstruct is a large start-up, and that is how we must carry on. It is a battle of ideas within a model of governance. In a world that keeps changing we have to adapt to modern mechanisms, taking our own mentality into account and handing the running of the business on to the generations after us.
The work: trust earned
The Badalyan brothers are the innovators of a modern cast of mind in Armenian life. They win because they know the magic of it: give the specialist freedom, and for the sake of it that person will hold to the work and carry it forward as they could for no other employer. They have broken stereotypes and go on breaking them; the Badalyans may fairly be counted avant-gardists.
Beyond the work itself, the company’s philanthropy in art, education, defence, sport, social causes and a great many other fields is simply beyond measure. That is what a state-minded outlook means. There is the international arena too: the world trusts them, and that trust is more than justified.
This is a company where the more the number of employees grows, the warmer the family atmosphere becomes — and families are formed here. You feel protected, you develop, and you know that you are an important part of a very large family, and that there is a place for you.
With their lives, their intellect, their education, their humanity and their work, these people have built a company without equal on the world stage. Study what they have to tell with attention, walk their road in your mind, and you will understand a great deal anew in your own life, and find it easier to smooth away the obstacles on your own path.
To work in the Badalyan group of companies, age, sex and colour are beside the point; what matters is knowing the job. Beyond a salary, people are valued by the conditions created for them — to study free of charge, to master a foreign language, to train, to dance, to enjoy themselves.
Working at “Soft” really is a pleasure: this is not only a job but a standing. People want to work here in particular. Arguments? They happen, and they are settled — as in a family. Ask anyone from Soft and they will confirm it.
Every time you see the magenta colours and read the name of the Badalyan brothers’ company on one brand or another, remember that the shine, the splendour and the lavishness did not fall from the sky. They were made on the ground. They were gathered by work, by flights of thought, by fair competition, by stubborn resistance, by not flinching at difficulty, by keeping respect for the great and the small alike, by turning aims into reality. Enjoy the glory and the beauty they have built — by respecting work, and by being responsible in your own.
Remember the doctor, the grain of whose good name became, years ago, a lifebelt in the ocean, and made it possible for you to have earnings and enjoyment today. Think of the teacher who ran out into the street with fear in her heart to ask passers-by whether her sons were alive, because in the hardest of times, at the risk of their own lives, they were sowing the seeds of your present prosperity and professional growth.
The family grows; the work goes on…
