Opportunities abound for the movers and shakers

Mian Muhammad Mansha, head of the Mansha family and chairman of the Nishat Group, is acknowledged as Pakistan’s first billionaire. Asim Hafeez / Bloomberg

From a wealthy Pakistani’s South Korean motor deal to Elon Musk’s plan to colonise Mars and a tech titan in New Zealand, those who have the power have lately not been hesitant about yielding it. Our bi-weekly look at the world of billionaires:

Mohammad Mian Mansha

Pakistan’s first billionaire is teaming up with South Korea’s biggest car maker.

Pending a feasibility study, the plan is for Mohammad Mian Mansha’s Nishat Mills to assemble passenger cars and commercial vehicles in Pakistan for Seoul-based Hyundai Motor.

Car sales in Pakistan have been rising at 19 per cent a year and the market is dominated by Japanese marques. But with the country’s economy growing at its fastest pace in a decade, the Japanese companies cannot keep up and consumers want more choices.

This has created an opening for Mr Mansha’s group.

Mr Mansha was born in 1947, the year of Partition. His family, which was originally from Pakistan but had moved to Calcutta in the 1930s, returned home to Pakistan.

In 1951 his father and uncle founded Nishat Mills. “The business prospered,” The Financial Times wrote in a 2012 profile of Mr Mansha, “thanks in part to the Korean war, which had led to soaring cotton prices as the American army sourced cotton across the continent for its troops’ uniforms, enriching huge swaths of aspiring Asian industrialists in the process.”

Today Lahore-based Nishat Mills is the country’s largest textile exporter, with clients including The Gap. Mr Mansha expanded into finance when he was part of a group that acquired Muslim Commercial Bank in 1991 as the government privatised assets. Forbes says Mr Mansha sold most of his stake in the bank in 2008 for US$900 million.

While Mr Mansha is acknowledged as his country’s first billionaire, recent estimates of his wealth are uneven and range from a high of $2.6 billion to a low of less than $1bn. Still, the arrow does seem to be pointing up: shares of Nishat Mills have risen 256 per cent over the past five years.

Sebastian Pinera

In this country’s election, the billionaire isn’t the outsider.

Chileans will elect a new president late this year. The tycoon Sebastian Pinera had been the front-runner but is now neck-and-neck with, of all things, a journalist.

Recent polls show Mr Pinera neck-and-neck with the upstart, Alejandro Guillier, a leftist journalist turned senator. Graft scandals and sluggish growth in the world’s top copper exporter have disenchanted Chileans with politics as usual and turned Mr Guillier’s outsider status into an asset.

Mr Pinera was previously Chile’s president from 2010 to 2014. After his election as president, he agreed to sell his major holdings. As Forbes summarises: “He unloaded his 26 per cent stake in Chilean airline LAN for $1.5 billion, sold the TV channel Chilevision to Time Warner for a reported $150m, and sold his share of popular football team Blanco & Negro.” Forbes estimates his net wealth at $2.7bn.

Mr Pinera’s father was a Chilean ambassador to the UN. Mr Pinera was educated at Harvard University and worked as an economics and business professor after his return to Chile. He founded Bancard, a credit card company, in 1976, and helped to popularise the cards in Chile.

In his subsequent attempt at a clarification, he confused the character's creator, Daniel Defoe (Moll Flanders, A Journal of the Plague Year), with the character actor Willem Dafoe (Platoon, Spider-Man).

Jorge Paulo Lemann

It’s time for Jorge Paulo Lemann to get back in the hunt.

That, anyway, is the word inside the food industry, where the Brazilian billionaire has been doing blockbuster deals roughly every two years. In 2013, he persuaded Warren Buffett to team up on HJ Heinz. Then in 2015 the duo orchestrated the $55bn merger of Heinz and Kraft Foods.

The talk has traders on edge. Last month, a story in a little-known Swiss magazine, resurfacing well-worn speculation about Mr Lemann’s plan to buy Mondelez with Mr Buffett, spurred a pop in the US snack giant’s shares. (They soared 28 per cent in just a few minutes.) So far, no deal has been announced.

Regardless, the question of what Mr Lemann might go after in 2017 has just about everyone grasping for leads. Besides Mondelez, some other names include General Mills, Kellogg and Campbell Soup.

All the attention goes to show just how much the 77-year-old Mr Lemann has reshaped and influenced the global food and beverage industry. In the past decade, he and his Brazilian partners at 3G Capital have made their names with a run of splashy deals, including for Tim Hortons and Burger King, and a singular vision of hacking away costs at every turn.

Bloomberg estimates Mr Lemann’s net worth at $27.7bn, making him the richest Brazilian.

Stan Druckenmiller

Stan Druckenmiller, the billionaire investor with one of the best long-term track records in money management, said he bought gold in late December and January, reversing the sale he made after the US presidential election.

“I wanted to own some currency and no country wants its currency to strengthen,” Mr Druckenmiller said this week in an interview. “Gold was down a lot, so I bought it.”

Mr Druckenmiller, who had held a gold position going into the Nov­ember election, sold it on election night, explaining in a CNBC interview that he was optimistic that Mr Trump’s administration would bring deregulation and “serious” tax reform that spurs growth. Those benefits, he said, were expected to outweigh concerns about more protectionist trade policies.

Initially, Mr Trump’s victory sent US equities to a record high and left gold tumbling, as investors speculated that economic growth and interest rates would rise. Then in December, both US Federal Reserve chairwoman Janet Yellen and European Central Bank president Mario Draghi warned that economic growth could be derailed, comments that spurred Mr Druckenmiller to make his purchase.

So far it’s paid off, as confusion over Mr Trump’s policies helped to rekindle haven demand for the precious metal. At about $1,234 an ounce at midweek, the spot price for gold was up almost 10 per cent from its December low.

Mr Druckenmiller, who learnt the currency business while working for George Soros, is worth $4.9bn, says Bloomberg.

Elon Musk

Elon Musk’s outer-space company plans to launch its Falcon 9 rockets every two to three weeks, its fastest rate since starting launches in 2010, once a new launch pad is put into service in Florida next week.

The ambitious plan comes only five months after a SpaceX rocket burst into flames on the launch pad at the company’s original launch site in Florida. SpaceX, which is controlled by Mr Musk, has launched only one rocket since then, in mid-January.

Mr Musk founded SpaceX 15 years ago. His idea was to reduce the cost of space transportation so it would be feasible to colonise Mars. According to a report on spaceref.com back in 2001, Mr Musk’s plan was to send to the Martian surface “a small rob­otic lander intended primarily as a mini-greenhouse, growing samples of food crops in an enclosed chamber filled with treated Martian regolith [soil], to test the feasibility of humans living off the land”.

Mr Musk’s other ventures include PayPal and Tesla Motors. He came on board at PayPal when its predecessor company merged with his online banking company. He guided its growth through to an IPO in 2002 and a sale to eBay for $1.5bn later that same year.

Mr Musk was born in South Africa and went to university in Canada and the US. He is worth $13.4bn, says Forbes.

Peter Thiel

The tech billionaire Peter Thiel has sparked a passport-for-sale row in New Zealand. He was granted citizenship in 2011 after having visited the country four times.

Mr Thiel’s application was approved by the New Zealand government on the grounds that his entrepreneurial skills and philanthropy were beneficial to the country, even though he didn’t meet the standard criteria or intend to live there, official documents released show.

New Zealand has become a preferred bolthole for the ultra-rich as they seek a haven from global political uncertainty and terror threats.

Mr Thiel, who cofounded PayPal and was an early shareholder in Facebook, has a net worth of $3.2bn. He has invested in the New Zealand accounting software company Xero, given NZ$1 million (Dh2.6m) to the Christchurch earthquake relief effort and, according to local media reports, bought several multimillion dollar properties around the country.

In a letter supporting his citizenship application, Mr Thiel wrote in March 2011: “It would be of great pride to let it be known that I am a New Zealand citizen and an enthusiastic supporter of the country and its emerging high-tech industry.”

Xiao Jianhua

Mystery continues to surround the whereabouts of the missing Chinese billionaire Xiao Jianhua.

He was last seen at Hong Kong’s Four Seasons hotel in late January, with some media saying he was abducted and taken to the mainland. Mr Xiao is one of China’s richest men and has close ties to some of its leaders and their relatives.

After his disappearance, a statement from him appeared on his company’s verified WeChat account saying he had not been abducted and had not been taken to mainland China. The statement added he was “currently abroad being medically treated”. Hong Kong police say Mr Xiao crossed the border to mainland China.

Authorities in Beijing have declined to comment on the case.

Mr Xiao was ranked 32nd on the 2016 Hurun China rich list, with an estimated net worth of $5.97bn.

Scores of China social media postings about Mr Xiao’s disappearance have been deleted.

One possibility is that it is connected to the Chinese president Xi Jinping’s crackdown on corruption.

Shares in companies directly or indirectly controlled by Tomorrow Group slumped last Friday, which because of the Chinese new year holiday was the first trading day after Mr Xiao’s disappearance became known. Baotou Huazi Industry and Xishui Strong Year Inner Mongolia were both down the maximum 10 per cent. Since then, Baotou shares have stabilised, while Xishui Strong Year is down another 7 per cent.

* Agencies and The National

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