Published: 24 August 2020
Last updated: 4 March 2024
IN AN INTERVIEW in the early 1980s, then-Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin, known for his criticism of what he perceived as the old left-wing elites, described kibbutzim members as acting “like millionaires lolling around their swimming pools.”
The residents of kibbutz Yizre'el are in fact millionaires but in their case, the swimming pools belong to other people around the world. The kibbutz is just making money off of them and a lot of it.
Yizre'el is home to Maytronics Ltd., which serves as its main source of income. Maytronics produces the robots that clean around half of the private pools that are not cleaned manually around the world and more than a third of public pools worldwide.
Earlier this month, Maytronics became the first kibbutz owned company to be listed on the TA-35 Index, which lists the 35 largest companies on the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange (TASE). Yizre'el holds a 60% stake in the company, whose market capitalization reached NIS 5.5 billion (approximately A$2.4 billion) this week.
FULL STORY Welcome to the kibbutz where socialist millionaires make robots to clean the pools of the world's wealthy (Calcalistech)
Photo: A factory worker constructs Maytronics' cleaning robot (Elad Gershgoren)
