Canadian billionaire Jimmy Pattison says his phone won’t stop ringing. There’s nothing like a global crisis to drive deals to those with cash.
“We’re looking today at opportunities like we’ve never had before,” Pattison said in an interview Monday via video conference from Vancouver. “We’ve never been in better shape to invest. The question now is, where do we feel comfortable?”
Sometimes dubbed Canada’s Warren Buffett, the 91-year-old Pattison has a view of the pandemic’s impact that few can match. He presides over an empire that operates in some 85 countries spanning an array of industries: supermarkets, lumber, fisheries, disposable packaging, theme parks, auto dealers and more. Last year, the closely held Jim Pattison Group Inc. had C$10.9 billion ($8.3 billion) in revenue and employed 48,000 people.
Pattison said he has been contacted by a number of private companies, some of them “significant” in size, that need money because of Covid-19 and the recession. He won’t speculate on where he’ll do his next deal. But he is certain that some of the economic changes wrought by the pandemic will be lasting. Airlines are out, downtown hotels face a difficult road back and the restaurant industry will never be the same, Pattison said.
Among his own companies, the hardest hit have been tourism-related stalwarts like Ripley Entertainment Inc., which typically hosted 15 million visitors annually at its museums and aquariums, and the Canadian franchise of Great Wolf Lodge, a chain of indoor water parks.
“I can tell you one thing -- there’s never been anything like this in the history of the world,” said Pattison, who grew up in western Canada during the Great Depression. “Going forward, it’s certainly going to affect what we buy.”
Before the pandemic, “I’d have put 100% of our money into a Great Wolf Lodge, but I wouldn’t today.” The coronavirus isn’t a one-time risk either, he said. “It can happen again.”
Climate Focus
Pattison, Canada’s fifth-richest person, built his empire from a single, loss-making Vancouver car dealership he acquired in 1961. His fortune today is worth about $6.7 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. In his office hangs a framed photo of Pattison and Buffett with a message scribbled across the top by the head of Berkshire Hathaway Inc.: “To a man who’s built a business as interesting as Berkshire’s.”
Pattison sits in a conference room at his 18th-floor headquarters in a tower that typically looks onto Vancouver’s pristine harbor and craggy, forest-draped mountains beyond. Recently, that view has been obscured by a sickly gray haze. Smoke from forest fires raging along the U.S. West Coast has been drifting north, at times making Vancouver No. 1 on the list of cities with the world’s most polluted air.
“We have got to focus on the environment, the environment, the environment,” Pattison said. “Anything that is negative, in my opinion, to do with the environment is going out of business sooner or later.”