Manufacturers continue to do very well with a weak pound and strong export sales. JCB, the Staffordshire construction equipment giant, more than doubled its profits in 2010 to £235m on £2 billion sales. It sold 51,600 machines last year, compared with 36,000 in 2009. This excellent performance is continuing in 2011, which is good news not just for JCB’s billionaire chairman Sir Anthony Bamford but for the company's 6,000 strong British workforce, mainly based in the stressed West Midlands. The Bamford family fortune, which stands at £1,650m, will easily rise above £2 billion in the 2012 Rich List.
Chris Rea's AES Engineering is what George Osborne and David Cameron have in mind when they talk about re-balancing the British economy towards manufacturing. The Rotherham-based industrial seals company saw its profits soar in 2010 from £6.6m to nearly £13m on sales which topped £100m for the first time. Rea, worth £65m and ranked 1,050= in Britain’s richest 2,000, can expect his personal fortune to move towards the £100m mark as a result of the AES profits growth.
Meat baron Lord Vestey and his family show no sign of feeling the pinch. The 2010 accounts of the main family business, Western United Investment Company, show a decent jump in profits from £2.2m to £4.5m on record sales of £593.5m. Surprisingly the Vesteys seem to take little out of the company which has not paid a dividend for 10 years, while the highest paid director received a pretty modest £500,000 salary. Whether the family adds to its total wealth of £750m will depend on what sort of compensation Western United receives from the Chavez government if, as is likely, the Vesteys pull out of their 300,000 hectares of land in Venezuela.
Profits soar for discount retailers
The Lalani family, who founded the 99p Stores retail chain, saw profits for their Daventry-based operation triple in 2010 to £6.3m. New entrants to Britain’s richest 2,000 at a lowly valuation of £39m, Nadir Lalani and his family, who now have 140 99p Stores in towns throughout England, should move sharply up next year’s Rich List..
But this pales beside the performance of the Arora brothers – Simon, Bobby and Robin, jointly worth £343m - who own B&M Retail. Annual sales have topped the half-billion pound mark at their Liverpool-based discount store business for the first time in the company's history. The 29% rise in revenues came during a year when the business added more than 2,500 staff to its ranks and opened 80 new stores in the UK. In its 2010 accounts, B&M's parent company Firesource reported a turnover of £549.1m, up from £426.7m a year earlier. Pre-tax profits increased by 11% to £35.8m.
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It must make many a struggling high-street retailer green with envy, none more so than Lord Harris, the founder and boss of the Essex-based chain Carpetright, who says he sees "no respite" in the challenging retail environment over the next year. Up until now Carpetright's shares have held up well but if Harris's comments are borne out, they may slide putting pressure on his £220m fortune.
Some fleet-footed retailers are of course able to profit from the downturn. Philip Day, owner of the Edinburgh Woollen Mill chain, has snapped up 30 of the 94 stores of the collapsed Jane Norman fashion group. Day, a turnaround expert, knows what he is doing and will no doubt add several millions to his £300m fortune.
Cashing in on property
On the takeover front David and Simon Reuben, 8th in our list with a £6.17 billion fortune, have just grabbed the In and Out Club in Piccadilly for £120m. It was bought from the receiver and had been owned by former billionaire Simon Halabi, who no longer graces the list. The heads of the four aristocratic, billionaire families who own swathes of the luxury acres in the heart of London - the Duke of Westminster, Earl Cadogan, Baroness Howard de Walden and Viscount Portman - will be delighted with a recent Savills report predicting that prime property will grow in value by more than 33% in the five years to 2015 on the back of huge overseas demand. It may even push Westminster back into the top three of the Rich List from his current fourth place, worth £7 billion.
The Reuben brothers also seem determined to make Trevor Hemmings richer. Currently worth £550m, ranked 140=, Lancastrian tycoon Hemmings is the leading shareholder, with a 41.5% stake, in Arena Leisure, which owns Lingfield Park and Doncaster racecourses. The Reubens, with a 30% stake, are expected to bid for the Arena business. But Hemmings is unlikely to bow out until a near £200m price is achieved, which would mean an £80m-plus windfall for him.
Look out too for Philip Noble making a handsome return on the sale of Brighton Pier which he has owned since 1984. His Noble Organisation has invested £35m in the 112-year-old, Grade II-listed structure.
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Veteran property tycoon and fuel retailer Gerald Ronson has always regarded his Snax 24 business as a weekend job while he concentrates on property during the week. But he will have to cut down on property now. He was part of a consortium that bought 810 service stations in the UK from Total for £350m. Typical of Ronson’s canny style of operating, the consortium immediately agreed to sell 254 sites to Shell for £240m.
Jasminder Singh's Edwardian Group, which runs the Radisson Edwardian hotels in Britain, turned in 2010 profits of £20.8m on sales of £134.7m, with £421m net assets, all records. That should push Singh’s £415m fortune near the £500m mark. But some hoteliers are having a torrid time. Administrators have taken over the five-star Waldorf hotel in the centre of London and the Hyatt Regency in Birmingham, which will almost certainly knock owners Gulshen Bhatia and her son Asif out of our list.
Stagecoach rides high
Congratulations to Brian Souter on his knighthood in the Queen's Birthday honours. The Stagecoach boss has double reason to celebrate. Recent results have cheered the City, with profits to April 2011 up 25% at £205m. The shares are riding at a three-year high, valuing the Perth-based transport operation at more than £1.8 billion. Souter and his sister Ann Gloag, worth £650m, will see their joint fortune top £700m if the group keeps motoring along at its current lick.
Windfalls are also heading the way of Nat Rothschild and Tony Pidgley, two very different characters. Rothschild, the Eton-educated billionaire financier and hedge fund manager, will share in a £162m windfall following the completion of the reverse takeover of an Indonesian coal group by his Vallar investment vehicle. Due to celebrate his 40th birthday, Rothschild will also add to his wealth through the imminent flotation of Vallares, an oil investment group planning a £1 billion float.
Pidgley, who was adopted from Barnado’s at the age of four, is set to make £85m after the luxury London housebuilder Berkeley he co-founded in 1976 said it would return £1.7 billion to shareholders over the next ten years. Pidgley will add gradually to his £110m fortune as the money hits his bank account in regular tranches.
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Malcolm Walker, the co-founder of Iceland Foods, has delivered some impressive 2010-11 results with profits rising 14.8% to £155.5m. Walker wants to lead a management buyout of the 67% of Iceland owned by the failed Icelandic bank Landsbanki and made an offer last year that valued the whole at £1 billion. But some of the big supermarkets may bid the value up to £1.7 billion in an auction. That could be bad news for Walker's ambition on the management front but would push the value of his own stake up to around £100m and his overall wealth to close to £200m. That could be an auction to lose.
At Betfair, the quoted internet betting exchange, the shares have now halved since its October stock market float. The market has been unsettled by the impending departure of its embattled chief executive and other executives. For the co-founders and substantial shareholders, Ed Wray and Ed Black, it has all been a nightmare. Wray's stake has collapsed in value from £175m to £88m, Black’s stake is down from £166m to £84m.