New Zealand Raider Brierley to Retire
Sir Ron Brierley, the corporate raider who turned New Zealand’s business community upside down, is to retire as chief of the investment company he founded 28 years ago.
Brierley, whose quiet personality and modest tastes belie his status as a multimillionare, said he would step down as chairman of Brierley Investments Ltd. next January.
The 52-year-old investor said he had considered the move for some time and denied a suggestion he might have been pushed out. “It’s probably something that’s developed over the past 18 months, I would say. I think it was totally voluntarily.”
In almost three decades he has invested in everything from the Paris department store Galleries Lafayette to Air New Zealand.
In 1988, Brierley launched an unsuccessful four-month takeover assault on CalMat, one of Los Angeles’ biggest and oldest companies. Eventually he agreed to sell his 19% stake for $242 million to Japan’s largest cement maker, Onoda Cement Co.
A cricket fanatic and stamp collector who has never married, Brierley dropped out of university and raised the money to float his company by publishing a share tip sheet. In 1961 he founded R. A. Brierley Investments with the avowed aim of seeking “dead companies”--firms with valuable assets unexploited by sleepy managements.
New Zealand entrepreneurs were to become commonplace in the mid-1980s after the Labor government deregulated the economy. But in the 1960s Brierley’s wheeling and dealing shocked a business establishment controlled by a few conservative companies.
The stockbroker establishment saw to it that Brierley’s company did not achieve full listing on the New Zealand Stock Exchange for almost a decade.
None of the entrepreneurs who emerged after Labor unshackled the economy was as successful. Brierley survived the 1987 stock market crash relatively unscathed as many less skilled operators fell by the wayside.
The maverick Brierley finally joined the establishment last year when he was knighted.
Brierley said he will not quit business altogether. He will remain chairman of Brierley’s Hong Kong-based raiding subsidiary Industrial Equity (Pacific), and plans to continue the business that is also his hobby--seeking undervalued companies ripe for takeover.
Brierley will take the title of Brierley Investments founder president and remain on the board. The new chairman will be Deputy Chairman Bruce Hancox, who has increasingly taken over day-to-day running of the company along with Chief Executive Paul Collins in recent years.
