Tetra Pak billionaire Rausing dies aged 93
Swedish industrialist, based in Britain, who built a fortune from the omnipresent Tetra Pak carton
Hans Rausing, the Swedish billionaire whose father founded Tetra Pak, has died at the age of 93, his family said.
The industrialist and entrepreneur died in his sleep at his home, Wadhurst Park, East Sussex, yesterday.
His children Lisbet, Sigrid and Hans Kristian said: “Our father was an extraordinary man, achieving so many things in his long and distinguished career ... and then as a philanthropist.
“We are very proud of that, but most of all we will cherish our fond memories of him as a loving father and devoted family man.”
HANS RAUSING, the Swedishborn industrialist who has died aged 93, was one of Britain’s wealthiest residents; his immense fortune derived from the humble but ingenious Tetra Pak milk carton developed by his father.
Hans Rausing and his older brother Gad controlled for many years what was virtually a worldwide monopoly in milk and fruit juice cartons, with sales in 165 countries accounting for more than 85 billion cartons per year; their private company Tetra Laval employed 36,000 people.
Their business affairs and family lives were conducted in almost total privacy, however, and for many years the wider world knew nothing about them beyond the guesses at their net worth which appeared in annual lists of the very rich.
In Hans Rausing’s case, however, the figures eventually became more concrete: in 1995 he sold his half share in Tetra Laval to Gad for some £4.5 billion, which was said in recent years to have grown to more than £6 billion.
Some months after Gad’s death in January 2000, Hans announced that he had taken a majority interest in a new packaging venture, Ecolean. Ecolean was developed in Sweden, consisting 60 per cent of chalk and 40 per cent of a plastic substance derived from natural gas. It was versatile, cheap and biodegradable, imitating the properties of an eggshell but without the brittleness. Rausing called it “ecologically perfect”.
Its unveiling also prompted him to give a rare interview. The ultimate purpose of the good businessman, he said, must be “to supply something which is absolutely necessary” – such as packaging which can deliver nourishment to children. “If you don’t have a moral imperative behind your company, then that company will have no drive. People must realise that not only are they making money, but they are contributing something towards society.”
As for the keys to success, “First, simplicity: never do things which are complicated. Second, you must talk and listen to everybody in your company.” And be prepared to take risks: “There is no way you can succeed in business by playing safe.”
Hans Rausing was born on March 25 1926. The family’s original name was
Andersson – very common in Sweden – but Hans’s father Ruben changed it to the more distinctive Rausing, derived from his native village of Raus.
Ruben trained as an economist and studied in the United States; having observed American advances in retail distribution, he returned to Sweden in the early 1920s and founded a rudimentary packaging business, breaking down sacks of flour and sugar into smaller, more saleable packets.
In 1944 Ruben was watching his wife make sausages in the family kitchen at Lund in southern Sweden when the idea of the Tetra Pak carton came to him.
Observing how the sausage skins were pinched at each end to close them, he decided to test the principle on milk cartons. He employed a research scientist called Wallenberg to perfect a design, based on a tetrahedron, in which the hygienic seal removed the need for refrigeration.
Ruben acquired the patent, and by 1952 the Tetra Pak was in commercial production. Hans studied Russian at university in Sweden and spent a summer at the University of California, before joining Ruben and Gad in the business, which initially employed only six people.
Gad was the more outgoing of the brothers, but his true passion was archaeology and it was Hans who soon proved to be the more commercially minded. He was managing director from 1954, in due course succeeding his father as chairman, a post he held until 1991.
By the mid-1960s, the original company was struggling for lack of profits, and the family sold out, but wisely bought back the rights to the Tetra Pak design. Their finances recovered, and from that time onwards, as profits multiplied, their business – ultimately controlled in Liechtenstein – was conducted in some secrecy, with no outside shareholders.
They developed numerous variations of the basic product
(the Tetra Brik, for example, and aluminium foil linings) while maintaining vigorous control of their patents. In due course the original cardboard Tetra Pak – which could often be difficult to open – was improved by the introduction of resealable plastic tabs, for which ironically the company had to pay royalties to a rival Norwegian packaging group.
One of Hans’s contributions was the development of Tetra Pak sales in Russia, where he first did business in 1958. The Russians had initially made their own copies of the product, but they always leaked; eventually Rausing was invited to help them get the design and manufacture right, and the company built up a workforce of 6,000 in Russia and Ukraine.
Ruben Rausing died in 1983. Around the same time, both Hans and Gad moved to England to escape punitive Swedish taxes – Hans lamented the fact that he was even obliged to sell his family home in Stockholm.
They gradually handed over management control to younger executives, but the company continued to expand its geographical reach, particularly in Eastern Europe and China, and was enlarged in 1991 by the acquisition of another Swedish industrial group, Alfa Laval.
Meanwhile, Hans acquired a 900-acre estate at Wadhurst in Sussex, where he commissioned a contemporary single-storey home, completed in 1985 and described by its architect, John Outram, as “built like a factory and finished like a palace”. It combined an almost windowless, concrete façade with a starkly elegant, high-ceilinged interior – very much a reflection of Rausing himself, a craggy and somewhat forbidding figure, who stood 6ft 8in tall.
Rausing also kept farms in Kent and Portugal and a home in Barbados, but his personal habits were frugal. Though he owned a vintage Rollsroyce which had been given to him as a present, he also drove a Lada and was once seen checking the price of tomatoes in his local supermarket.
He attracted adverse comment in some quarters of the British press for the elaborate measures by which he minimised the family’s tax bills. But he gave large sums to good causes; Rausing family trusts collectively gave away up tens of millions a year. Recent donations included £2.5million to English Heritage to help build a new footbridge at Tintagel Castle in Cornwall, and £10million to the Royal Academy of Arts.
Among Hans’s personal benefactions was £2.5 million for Cambridge University’s Centre for Mathematical Science and scholarships in the history of science at Imperial College, London. He also supported charitable and academic projects in Russia.
Rausing himself had little real interest in money: he was more proud of the design patents granted to his companies than the fortune they had generated. “I am an industrialist. I understand machinery. I do not understand money.” He was once asked: did money bring him happiness? “I always felt perfectly happy without much money. But you feel more happy with money than without.”
Hans Rausing, who was appointed an honorary KBE in 2006, is survived by his wife Marit, whom he married in 1957, and by their daughters Lisbet and Sigrid and son Hans Kristian.
Hans Rausing, born March 25 1926, died August 30 2019