With Westfield sale, Frank Lowy calls time on rags-to-riches story
SYDNEY (Reuters) – Australian billionaire Frank Lowy, a co-founder of global retail property group Westfield Corp., said on Tuesday he looks forward to being an investor rather than an executive, nearly six decades after opening a small shopping center on Sydney’s outskirts.
Lowy, 87, a Holocaust survivor who became a knighted property tycoon, will retire from Westfield, and his sons Steven and Peter will retire as co-CEOs, marking a dynastic end to their Westfield rule in the wake of a proposed $24.7 billion sale to France’s Unibail-Rodamco.
“It’s more than a lifetime that I’ve put into this company,” Lowy told reporters via a video link in London. “It’s time, from a personal point of view, for me to move on. We want to change our roles; we would rather be investors than executives.”
The Lowy family owns 9% of Westfield and, if the cash-andshare deal goes through, will end up with a 2.8% stake in Unibail-Rodamco.
The proposed deal is the latest in a retail-sector shakeup, with online giants such as Amazon.com Inc. putting the squeeze on operators of shopping centers.
Westfield has melded traditional mall stores with upscale food courts, restaurants, bars, cinemas and boutique fashion outlets to keep people shopping in brick-and-mortar stores.
“Westfield has assets in the UK and in the United States that are all in mature Amazon markets,” Morningstar REIT analyst Tony Sherlock said. “They’re already 50% through that online retail switch.”
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In his adopted homeland, Lowy, who was born in what is now Slovakia, is seen as an immigrant success story and a savvy developer who survived the Internet-fueled onslaught on the retail sector.
In his early years, Lowy lived in a ghetto in Hungary during World War II and was moved frequently before being interned in a British detention camp in Cyprus. He has said he later learned his father was beaten to death at the Auschwitz concentration camp.
Lowy arrived in Australia in the 1950s and met surviving members of his family. He went on to co-found Westfield Development Corp. with a friend John Saunders by developing a shopping center in the down-market western suburbs of Sydney.
Westfield listed on Australia’s stock exchange in 1960.
Lowy said the Unibail-Rodamco agreement was the second-most important day in Westfield’s history. “The most important was [in] September 1960, when Westfield was born,” he said.
The Australian shopping centers have since been separated from Westfield’s US and European businesses and are not part of the proposed sale.
Lowy has spent the past decade near the top of Australian rich lists, with an estimated wealth this year of A$8.26b. ($6.23b.), and he retains a high public profile in sports administration as a former chairman of Football Federation Australia.
He is often credited with establishing soccer as a leading sport in a country where it has had to vie with the traditionally more popular rugby league, rugby union and Australian Rules football.
But Lowy said selling Westfield would not necessarily give him more free time.
“I’m not looking for too much time to spare, but the workload will be totally different,” he said. “It’s real investing rather than managing.”