Prem Watsa: Meet the man behind the RIM shakeup
V. Prem Watsa, born in Hyderabad, India in 1950, will become an independent director at Research in Motion Inc. as chief executives Jim Balsillie and Mike Lazaridis step aside.
RELATED: Read the latest on RIM
“The richest, savviest guy you’ve never heard of,” Toronto Life called him in a profile in 2009, a year after he defied the buoyant financial community and predicted the global financial meltdown.
Chairman and chief executive officer of Fairfax Financial Holdings Ltd., Watson made another rarefied list in 2010: he didn’t take a bonus on his $600,000 annual salary.
Watsa, who lives in Toronto, is often called Canada’s Warren Buffett for his unexpected, unorthodox buying moves, predictions and choices. Unlike Buffett, though, he’s notoriously publicity shy. He seems to have been working behind the scenes during RIM’s revamp.
Fairfax has been buying RIM stock and is now among its largest shareholders.
Just this year, Watsa, 61, crafted the deal that saved Ireland’s banking sector while Fairfax was in the middle of a buying spree that included Sporting Life, Prime Restaurants (East Side Mario’s, Fionn MacCool’s, Bier Markt) , and William Ashley China.
“He was an educator, a school principal in India who valued learning and made sure his children got an education.”
His father had been orphaned as a boy but rose to become principal of the Hyderabad Public School, an elite private school compared to Upper Canada College, Toronto Life said.
Prem Watsa would attend that school, one of the few middle-class students.
Watsa earned a bachelor’s degree in chemical engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology in 1971 and his MBA from the University of Western Ontario after emigrating in 1972.
He chose the Richard Ivey School of Business at Western, he told Toronto Life, because it was near his brother, who had emigrated earlier.
Watsa and his wife, Nalini, have two daughters and a son, who is named Ben after 1930s value investor Ben Graham, a seminal business influence, Toronto Life said.
Buffett is also a value investor, described as a financial mind who defies the traditional economic belief that the markets are self-correcting.
That philosophy, Watsa has said, helped him predict the 1987 market crash, the 1990 Japanese collapse and the 2008 economic meltdown.
Just before the first Dow Jones collapse in 2008, Watsa had moved much of his company’s $16-billion portfolio out of the stock market and into treasury bonds and cash.
He has been chairman and CEO of Fairfax, an insurance and investment company, since January, 1985. He controls about half the voting rights of Fairfax, a business disclosure document said.
Fairfax was Canada’s most profitable corporation in 2008.
As well as CEO of Fairfax and director of ICICI Bank Ltd. in Mumbai, Watsa is chancellor of the University of Waterloo, taking over in 2009 from Lazaridis.
Watsa himself said at his university appointment that his father would be proud.
“Prem Watsa is a tremendous self-made leader who demonstrates integrity and reflects the qualities the university embraces and seeks to encourage among our students,” then Waterloo president David Johnston said. Johnston is now Canada’ governor-general.
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