Billionaire Anthony Pratt is describing a scene from the movie A.I. Artificial Intelligence, relating it back to the success he’s enjoyed since 2009, when he took over the family business, Visy, from his late father Richard. Towards the end of the 2001 Steven Spielberg movie, the main character David spends time with his cloned dead mother, who could live for only a day.
“I thought about that movie recently and what I would do if my father came back to life one day, and I was sitting next to him in his bed,” says Pratt. “Well, I’d give him a beer and I’d tell him all the things that have happened.
“And he’d say, ‘really?’”
Pratt, 57, is laughing as he recounts the thought but it’s clear why he’d be keen to fill his father in on progress. Visy and its US sister company, Pratt Industries, have grown dramatically over the past eight years.
As a result, the Pratt fortune has reached a record $12.6 billion this year, enough for the family patriarch to reclaim the number one position on the Financial Review Rich List for the first time since 2009, when the list was published a month after the death of the previous patriarch, his father Richard Pratt. Then, the Pratt fortune was estimated to be $4.3 billion. Then, the family fortune included extended family such as Anthony’s brothers-in-law, Raphael Geminder and Alex Waislitz. Now, Geminder and Waislitz are Rich List billionaires in their own right.
Pratt’s elevation from number two in 2016 to the top of this year’s list comes at the expense of last year’s number one, Harry Triguboff. Though the Sydney property developer’s wealth has risen about $830 million to a record $11.45 billion, Pratt’s has grown more, due to the success of Pratt Industries in the US.
“Money is a great scoreboard of success, or one of them,” says Pratt when discussing his ascent to number one. “It’s a great honour and I feel very fortunate that I’m in a position that I can build a business. We’ve more than doubled the size of the business since 2009. But it’s like that saying, ‘if I have seen further, it is by standing upon the shoulders of giants’. I was very fortunate that I had my father. He was a great man and a great teacher.”
Richard Pratt was also an extremely hard taskmaster, famously berating his son in front of executives and worrying that he would not be able to take the family business forward after his death.
The son well and truly has, by taking some big bets on the comeback of the American manufacturing sector. Amazon’s US customers unpack their goods from Pratt-made boxes. Americans moving home buy more than a million Pratt-made boxes from Home Depot each week. And Pratt has begun packing batteries into its own boxes for Eveready. When Pratt arrived in America in 1991, the business had one paper mill, in Macon, Georgia. In March he opened his 68th factory, a sheet plant in Beloit, Wisconsin.
Pratt, his partner Claudine Revere and their children, Leon, eight, and Lilly, six, live in the family mansion Raheen, in Melbourne. But Pratt spends about 40 per cent of his time in the US, where Revere also owns a business, Relish Caterers, in New York.
The trappings of wealth, Pratt says, mean “you get to choose who you work with. And you also get to see your children grow up if you want to.” The point being, “I don’t have to stay away from home.” That means returning to Raheen every evening while in Australia, and to the penthouse atop New York’s Sherry-Netherland Hotel on Central Park when in the US.
Money, power and US President Donald Trump
Money doesn’t necessarily bring with it power, Pratt contends, arguing that the latter is reserved for media magnates and politicians. “But you do have a certain amount of influence and access, which is different to power,” he says.
That access certainly helps. In April last year, Pratt had his $1 billion paper mill near Chicago opened by Mike Pence, then governor of Indiana, now US Vice-President. In July, Pratt attended Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull’s election night party. This March, Pratt became the last member to be accepted at US President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago club in Palm Beach, Florida, before the estate was closed to new applicants.
In early May, Pratt told Trump and Turnbull at a New York dinner that he would spend $US 2 billion to expand his US business over the next decade and create 5000 new jobs. Trump led a standing round of applause and was heard to remark with a smile: “That’s chicken feed for you, Anthony.”
Pratt is not as gregarious as his father, who was famous for his parties. But he follows a similar path, networking with politicians and showing up to business conferences.
In April he executive-produced a concert by the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra, at which he conducted Richard Wagner’s Ride of the Valkyries. “I am in my element at functions that have three qualities: one they are an event, two there’s a customer angle and three, there is some societal greater good to it,” he says. “They tend to be my sweet spot.”
A typical Pratt day starts between 2am and 3am, with a phone call to executives on the other side of the world. Four to five hours later he has breakfast with his family, after which he sets off to visit his factories and/or clients, criss-crossing on his corporate jet whichever country he happens to be in. Each time he opens a new factory it’s alongside a politician, in the latest case the governor of Wisconsin, Scott Walker. If such events are tedious, he’s not admitting to it.
'This business is like the Sistine Chapel to me'
“Not at all. In many ways, this business is like the Sistine Chapel to me. I’m sure the guy who painted the last part of the Sistine Chapel wasn’t getting bored of it. [Each factory] is another intricate part of the business, which is hopefully difficult to replicate and inter-generational. It’s like looking at it from the point of view of a craftsman. It’s a continued work in progress. I’m motived by legacy. Which is different to how you’re viewed at the time or even when you first pass away. Legacy is important to me. It motivates me more than money.”
The Australian-based Visy, which Pratt owns with sisters Heloise Pratt and Fiona Geminder, still accounts for slightly more than half the total group’s $7.5 billion revenue but Pratt Industries, which Pratt wholly owns, is catching up. Since 1991 it has bought dozens of small US box-making factories, known as sheet plants, which sell value-added products such as jewellery boxes for Tiffany & Co. The plants become customers of Pratt’s corrugated cardboard factories, buying their cardboard sheets from the company’s paper mills.
“It’s the magic of our supply chain,” explains Pratt. “My strategy is to have one of these sheet plants every 160 miles in America. The shipping radius to have good service is about 80 miles, so you have one every 160 miles so you can ship to each other. At the moment, we’ve got four paper mills and about 68 box factories. Using that mathematics we’d need roughly 240. So my goal by the end of my life is to have 12 paper mills and 240 factories in America. But no one can read the future, I’d put that caveat on it.”
Pratt is comfortable focusing on the long term. He toiled away in the US for 14 years before the growth momentum quickened. The turning points came in 2005, when Hurricane Katrina hit the south, and in 2006, with the release of Al Gore’s environmental action documentary film An Inconvenient Truth. Clients started clamouring for Pratt’s recycled cardboard boxes, which its US rivals did not sell in great numbers. Deals with companies such as Amazon, Home Depot and Walmart followed. “To me, life is like a washing machine. It is not a journey or a straight line. It is not linear. There is always uncertainty and there are different cycles and ups and downs, agitation and tough times. But then you look at it after some time and you see you’ve built something,” he says.
“We started in America with a goal of $1 million per month EBITDA, which seemed like a lot at the time. Today we’re about $1 billion EBITDA across the whole business [in Australia and the US], so it’s been a very unexpected ride.”
As much as he can forecast what will happen, Pratt is adamant he will always keep the business in private hands – he knocked back an approach from TPG private equity boss David Bonderman in 2009 – and that he will never step down from his executive chairman role.
“I plan to retire to the cemetery. I think retirement is a death sentence, put it that way. What are you going to do when you retire? ‘Til death to us part, I say. My real legacy is my children. I want my two kids to take over my company. I’m very hopeful they will both be interested in running the company and continuing to grow it. And that’s the thing about America – I think there’s another three generations of growth left in the company before we start looking seriously at other countries.”
John Stensholt travelled to the US as a guest of Pratt Industries.
