Thomas Schmidheiny inherited a cement company from his father that’s poised to become the world’s biggest. Yet what really excites the Swiss billionaire is a wine sideline with sales of about 0.1 percent of the cement revenue.
“If I could come back in my next life, it would be as a winemaker,” Schmidheiny said over coffee at Heerbrugg, his 12- acre vineyard that tumbles down the verdant hills flanking the Rhine where Switzerland and Austria meet.
Schmidheiny, 68, joined the family company at a Mexican subsidiary in 1970, became CEO of Holcim Ltd. in 1978, and inherited his father’s share in the business in 1984.
Since then, he has built Holcim, in which he’s the largest investor, into a global leader while increasing his wealth to $6.8 billion. Last month, Holcim and Lafarge SA announced a merger that would create the world’s No. 1 cement producer, with sales of $44 billion.
Schmidheiny has worked similar magic with his vineyards, albeit on far smaller scale. Using profits from his cement fortune, Switzerland’s fourth-richest person has created wine operations that span four continents. And though wine is his passion, he’s also a lifelong entrepreneur with little interest in running a business at a loss.
“I have a philosophy that the investments we make have to be profitable,” Schmidheiny said. “We have very few that are, in the long run, not profitable, and it’s the same with the wine.”
Cheval Blanc
As a bonus, the vineyards have helped him forge relationships with executives involved in the cement merger: Albert Frere, the largest shareholder in Lafarge, is part-owner of Cheval Blanc, a renowned vineyard in Bordeaux’s Saint-Emilion region. And Wolfgang Reitzle, the Holcim chairman who will oversee the merger, makes wine in Tuscany.
Schmidheiny’s family has as much of a history in wine as it does in cement. His grandfather founded a vine growers’ cooperative and his dad started making wine on the family’s Heerbrugg estate, where Schmidheiny remembers watching the grapes come in when he was a child.
“I grew up with the vineyard,” Schmidheiny said on a tour of the estate that’s home to the three-story white house he was born in, and where the heads of stags from his father’s hunting trips are still mounted at the entrance.