$27.8bn empire: Inside the world of Australia’s cardboard king Anthony Pratt
From partying with Katy Perry to being praised by US presidents, this is the inside story of how Anthony Pratt built a global empire.
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Australia’s wealthiest people generally fall into one of three categories: mining tycoons, property moguls or tech geniuses.
That’s what makes the perpetual presence of Anthony Pratt at the top of rich lists so fascinating.
We mere mortals can understand how billions of dollars are made from digging up resources, owning real estate or inventing software. But manufacturing cardboard boxes? It sounds unsophisticated, even mundane. It does not sound like the key to a $27.87bn empire that is praised by prime ministers and presidents, celebrated by celebrities and beloved by communities.
Pratt’s success stems from thinking outside the box while his competitors think about boxes.
He learned much of his playbook – recycling, reinvestment, relationships – from his father Richard. While it may not be cloaked in corporate mystery, it has nevertheless fuelled a remarkable rise on both sides of the Pacific Ocean, unmatched by his industry rivals.
Visy, the business started by Pratt’s grandfather Leon in Victoria in 1948, now turns over $4bn a year. In the US, the annual revenue of Pratt Industries is $6bn, making its 63-year-old chairman Australia’s biggest employer and investor in our closest ally. Combined with his philanthropic endeavours, this puts Pratt at the top of another list as well.
“I don’t think it’s hyperbole to say that for the past 30 years, Anthony Pratt has been one of the most positive influences on strengthening the US-Australian alliance,” says John Berry, the former US ambassador to Australia who now leads the American Australian Association.
“If he ain’t No. 1, he’s clearly in the top three.”
Pratt’s journey over those three decades also has put paid to any suggestion that his achievements are an inevitable extension of his inheritance.
Yes, his father was Australia’s fourth-richest person before his death in 2009. But he had entrusted his son with leading their US expansion, and within a year of Anthony Pratt arriving in 1991, he had to sell their only mill, in Georgia, as the losses piled up in an industry-wide downturn.
What could have been the end of him became the making of him. Ringing in his ears was one more piece of advice from his father: You’ll never lose if you’re betting on the US.
The odds have been in Pratt’s favour ever since, as he spells out at the opening of his sixth American paper mill in Henderson, Kentucky.
“Since I arrived here in 1991, we have grown from the 57th largest (box-making) company to the fourth largest,” he says over a coffee in the boardroom last month.
“We’ve got there by investing to the value of $US12bn and employing 12,000 people.”
And Pratt is only just getting started. The $US700m facility in Kentucky is the first part of a new decade-long plan to invest another $US5bn in the US, creating 5000 more jobs.
“We’ve still only got 8 per cent of the market here, even though we’re bigger than in Australia where we’ve got 50 per cent of the market,” he says.
“The great thing about America is that steady growth is forever.”
THE BOXING KANGAROO AND THE BOXER
Muhammad Ali Drive, the road to Pratt’s newest mill, began its life in the boxing legend’s backyard in Indiana in 1996.
Pratt and some of his customers arrived in that backyard for what they expected would be a brief meet-and-greet with the three-time heavyweight champion, arranged by NFL Hall of Famer Mel Blount as a favour to the Australian who had helped his charity.
Six hours later, Pratt was still swapping stories with his hero, as well as Ali’s wife Lonnie.
“That was the start of a wonderful, and for me inspirational, relationship over the next 20 years with Muhammad and Lonnie,” he says.
Ali was a guest at Pratt’s wedding the next year – he married New York Democrats staffer Ali Giske – before Pratt escorted him on a lap of honour at the 1998 AFL Grand Final.
Pratt became a founding patron of the Muhammad Ali Center, while Ali visited Pratt’s factories and even appeared in a cardboard commercial alongside actor Alicia Silverstone.
Fast forward to 2021, five years after Ali’s death, when Pratt’s name flashed up on Lonnie’s phone. He was thinking of building a factory in Kentucky, Ali’s home state, and he thought his old friend might be able to help.
“When he called me and said he wanted to put a paper mill in Henderson, I was over the moon,” she says. “I knew what that meant. It meant good jobs for this community.”
Lonnie Ali called a friend of hers, Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear, and arranged for him to meet Pratt and his team on a wintry day during the pandemic. Beshear was working alone in his office – except for his black poodle Winnie – when they arrived. “We’re really lucky they like dogs,” Beshear laughs.
Two years later, the paper mill and box factory – which is five times the size of the MCG surface – is up and running, with Pratt praising Beshear for “moving mountains” to make it happen. Both the Governor and Ali helped Pratt open the facility last month. “Muhammad would be elated to know that his name graces a road that leads to a place where everyday people have an opportunity to work and make a good living,” Ali tells hundreds of customers, community leaders and workers at the launch.
Beshear is similarly effusive about what he calls “one of the most exciting projects in Kentucky’s history”. His job creation record is central to his pitch for re-election next month, and so Pratt’s investment – and the 325 jobs it guarantees in Henderson – is perfectly timed for a Democrat fighting to stay in charge of the Republican stronghold state.
“This is our chance to change everything … to never be a flyover state ever again, but to be the destination,” Beshear says, as he hails the Australian for his “inspirational” leadership.
Pratt tells the crowd that Beshear is “America’s greatest governor”, a compliment that leaves him looking genuinely chuffed. It is at this point someone in the audience turns to a Pratt employee and says of the billionaire: “I thought he was a Trump guy.”
RECYCLING HELPS POLITICAL BETS PAY OFF
Politics is not to be discussed in our half-hour interview with Pratt, who prefers to focus on his business’s latest milestone and its contribution to the US-Australia alliance. He barely glances at the handwritten notes on his legal pad as he reels off the facts and figures that have defined his sales pitch for decades.
Pratt Industries now has 72 sites in 26 American states based on a “hub-and-spoke model” its chairman says is “very unusual in our industry”. Rather than buying up factories, the company builds its own hi-tech facilities, having opened six out of the past eight new paper mills in the US, and surrounded each of them with as many as a dozen box factories.
Pratt’s packaging is completely recycled, another point of difference that saves six football fields worth of trees an hour – that’s American football fields, he hastens to add.
“Recycling is an important weapon against climate change,” Pratt says, reusing one of his favourite lines before throwing out more statistics to prove the point.
Methane is about a third of all greenhouse gases; landfills are the third biggest emitter of methane; more carbon emissions are produced by landfills than aviation.
“Every tonne of waste paper that we stop going to landfill saves three tonnes of CO2 emissions,” Pratt concludes, “so it’s a really big impact.”
He reflects that the US, much like Australia, is “smack dab in the middle of two big revolutions”: the necessity of sustainability, and the reshoring of domestic manufacturing.
On both fronts, Pratt has been ahead of the curve, so much so that politicians of all stripes have been happy to bask in his reflected glory as their narratives have come to match his. In turn, Pratt has worked relentlessly to develop political friendships with benefits.
As far back as 1995, he had president George HW Bush open a mill in Atlanta, while New York mayor Rudy Giuliani showered him with tax concessions to build an even bigger facility on Staten Island – the first new factory in the Big Apple since World War II. (It opened the day after his 1997 wedding to Giske. They later separated, one of his two failed marriages.)
Most memorably, president Donald Trump opened his Ohio mill in 2019, marvelling at Pratt’s “finest equipment in the world” and labelling him “No. 1 in Australia”. It was an occasion years in the making.
During Trump’s 2016 campaign, Pratt – while travelling between his factories on his Bombardier Global Express jet – foresaw the unlikely victory, having sensed the support in middle America for Trump’s plans to take on China and rebuild domestic manufacturing. To prove his prediction, he put $100,000 on the Republican at the TAB, landing a $450,000 payout.
With Trump in the White House, Pratt made sure he knew about his support, securing a $US200,000 membership to the president’s Mar-a-Lago club in Florida where he would see him regularly and spruik his investments, businessman to businessman.
That is how politics works in the world of Trump, something Pratt identified more quickly than most. (It helped that his current partner, Claudine Revere, knew the president through her New York catering business that ran the kiosk at Trump’s Central Park ice skating rink.)
With Trump planning a comeback in 2024, Pratt continued to visit Mar-a-Lago even after he left office. In 2021, Trump reportedly shared secret information about America’s nuclear submarines with him after Pratt suggested the US should sell its boats to Australia. The conversation was brought to the attention of investigators who have laid charges over Trump’s handling of classified information, and could make Pratt a witness in the case.
But the two revolutions Pratt has been riding – sustainability and reshoring manufacturing – have only accelerated under President Joe Biden, and he already knew him too, having shared breakfast in 2016 when the Democratic veteran was Barack Obama’s vice president. At the time, Biden complained to Pratt that 90 per cent of corporate earnings were funnelled into share buybacks and dividends. Sitting in his new Kentucky mill, Pratt says it is “proof that we’re not like that – we invest our corporate earnings back into machinery and jobs”.
When Biden nominated Caroline Kennedy to serve as his ambassador to Australia, Pratt was the first to congratulate her. The appointment signifies Biden’s respect for the alliance, he says, and he is honoured to have “American royalty” at the Kentucky opening. “President Biden often says, ‘When I hear climate, I think jobs’,” Kennedy says. “After today, when I hear jobs, I will think Anthony Pratt and Governor Beshear.”
During our interview, when asked about the US-Australia alliance, Pratt does offer one inherently political judgment: “I think this president and ambassador … are the best combination of president and American ambassador to Australia in the 30 years we’ve been here, because they are committed to climate change and sustainability, they are committed to AUKUS, and they are committed to the alliance.”
Trump might not like that. But Pratt has long demonstrated an ability to work with all sides of politics, opening doors with his reputation and his donations, just like his father did.
In 2019, at Bill Shorten’s election night party-turned-funeral, Pratt stuck by the Labor leader even after the true believers began to lose faith, comparing Shorten (whose first wife was Pratt’s father’s goddaughter) to the then-recently departed Bob Hawke. Two days later, Pratt was celebrating in the backyard of his local MP, deputy Liberal leader Josh Frydenberg.
Berry, who was appointed by Obama, makes this observation: “Whether it’s Republican or Democrat, whether it’s Liberal or Labor, the guy is committed to America and the US-Australia relationship.”
HUMBLE GENEROSITY AMID RITZY PARTIES
While Pratt says Melbourne will always be home, his life is divided between both countries.
In New York, he lives across from Central Park in a three-level apartment atop the Sherry-Netherland Hotel, which was purchased by his mother Jeanne for $3m in the 1980s.
Few Pratt investments have generated a better rate of return than that penthouse, which Malcolm Turnbull once described as “Disneyland for grown-ups” when he dropped by a party while prime minister in 2016, only to find guests being entertained by rapper Ludacris.
Pratt met Revere in the restaurant at the base of the building in 2006. Despite reports to the contrary, the pair have never married, but they share two children: 14-year-old Leon, named after Pratt’s grandfather, and 11-year-old Lilly.
Pratt says having children is “the best thing I’ve ever done” and his “greatest legacy”. “That’s really the most important thing to me,” he says.
While he has previously spoken of his desire for them to join the family business, he is more circumspect when the question is raised now.
“If they want to,” Pratt says. “It’s really up to them … whatever they want to do, they can do.”
Living in Melbourne, where they attend school, Pratt’s children are nonetheless exposed to their father’s world of movers and shakers at their heritage-listed home in Kew.
The guest list for Leon’s bar mitzvah at the Raheen mansion in February last year featured Frydenberg and then Victorian premier Daniel Andrews, while comedians Hamish Blake and Andy Lee hosted the party and singers Guy Sebastian and Cody Simpson performed.
The next weekend, then prime minister Scott Morrison attended a function there, celebrating Australia’s food and beverage industry, with the legendary Barry Humphries providing the entertainment in one of his final performances before his death this year.
“Barry was a friend of mine,” Pratt says, recalling how his father acted with Humphries in the Melbourne Theatre Company in the 1950s.
“He was a great Australian, as was my father. He was probably the Oscar Wilde of Australia.”
Another industry function is planned at Raheen next February, when American singer Katy Perry is expected to reprise her performance of hits at Pratt’s Central Park residence last December.
The novelty of such a superstar singing at his home appears to have somewhat worn off for Pratt, who says simply that he enjoys sharing the success of his business.
“We just like to have these big events where we are able to bring people together,” he says.
He takes a similar approach to philanthropy. Along with his corporate investment pledges, he has vowed to give away an extraordinary $1bn over his life through the Pratt Foundation. The biggest portion of his donations, he says, is directed to the US-Australia alliance, such as a fellowship program backed by the Quad countries – Australia, America, Japan and India – and cultural exchanges featuring the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra.
Berry says that when he had the chance to secure prime New York office space for the American Australian Association, Pratt was the first donor to contribute. And when Australia’s former US ambassador Arthur Sinodinos and Berry suggested Australia needed a presence in Washington’s think tank community, Pratt was immediately convinced to finance an Australia chair at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “If you’ve got a good idea, he’s a doer,” Berry says.
Earlier this year, Pratt also donated $1m to the campaign for an Indigenous Voice to Parliament. But with the referendum on the horizon, it is not an issue he is willing to speak about, instead directing questions to his adviser. (“It just seemed like the right thing to do at the time,” the adviser says, before redirecting the interview away from politics.)
Pratt’s confidantes highlight the importance of his trust in his experienced team, in contrast to the recent instability in the corporate ranks of his fellow Australian rich listers.
“If he has a secret power, that’s it. He’s quick to make a judgment as to whether it’s good or bad, but once it’s made, he turns it over to the experts on his team and they run with it,” Berry says.
“What’s always impressed me is he’s a humble guy. He’s not somebody who thinks he’s the smartest guy in the world or the richest guy … he’s not big on tooting his own horn.”
In Kentucky, it is almost impossible to spot Pratt’s self-promoting socks – emblazoned with pictures of his face – beneath his tailored suit and Brooks running shoes.
LOOKING AT THE FUTURE
Henderson, a town of about 28,000 people, was changing rapidly even before Pratt turned its golf driving range into what he says is the world’s most advanced paper mill.
While coal mining continues, the area’s coal-fired power station shut down after nearly half a century, leaving locals to contemplate life without the extraction industry.
Kennedy compares it to the challenge facing regional Australia. That is why Pratt’s investment matters, she says, “because we’re looking at the future” of green jobs.
Her counterpart Kevin Rudd, Australia’s US ambassador, is also at the opening. Branding himself an “honorary Kentuckian”, because his great-great-grandfather sailed down the Ohio River past Henderson on his way to Australia in 1865, Rudd recalls encountering Pratt’s ingenuity and generosity while he was PM. Now Henderson will benefit, he says, in what is part of Biden and Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s clean energy transformation.
For Henderson Mayor Brad Staton, this is exactly what his residents need. A massive road upgrade is also underway and a 300-home development breaks ground in October.
“Our city hasn’t really grown materially for a long time,” Staton says. “It’s something that’s going to be a catalyst for growth … We know what it means to have them here.”
Pratt’s green dream – and the jobs it supports – doesn’t end in Henderson. Even before officially opening the plant, Pratt is thinking about where he will be in a decade.
“I can see us building three more of these facilities by then, each one having 10 box factories surrounding it,” he says.
The idea of one day walking away certainly hasn’t crossed his mind.
“I don’t have any plans to retire any time soon … Mick Jagger is 80,” he points out, days after The Rolling Stones released a new album.
You can’t always get what you want? Don’t tell that to Anthony Pratt.
Originally published as $27.8bn empire: Inside the world of Australia’s cardboard king Anthony Pratt
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