The Virgin Group At the age of 16, Richard Branson set up the student magazine. From the beginning his strategy was to identify the subjects that were neglected and not touched by well established companies and this gave him the competitive advantage (Pryce, 2009). In 1970, a mail order record was his new venture from where Virgin was founded. From that time on, he expanded virgin group into travel and tourism, mobile, leisure, mobile, finance etc and created a great empire – Virgin Empire consisting of more than 200 companies in more than 30 countries (Virgin, n.d. e). Branson has invested on companies with long term capital growth or which achieves long term value creation and feels this as the best approach for private companies (Pryce, 2009). Even when there were barriers in the virgin group journey, such as 1972-82 recessions, 1990-91 Persian Gulf War, Branson did not fall back. He continually expended the group into areas which were dominated by the big companies while select...