Anthony Pratt: From Zoom to boom time

With his business booming, COVID-19 has billionaire Anthony Pratt making the transition from corporate jets to Zoom chats.

Visy chairman Anthony Pratt. Picture: Nic Walker

COVID-19 has caused billionaire Anthony Pratt to make the transition from corporate jets to Zoom chats for vital meetings with customers.

Pratt has long said making boxes is a relatively homogeneous business, which has made the customer-centric focus his Visy and Pratt Industries businesses have a vital part of doing business.

Before the coronavirus pandemic, it meant spending roughly half the year in the US and the other half in Australia.

In either country, but particularly the US, it meant Pratt would often spend a day flying around across the continent on his Bombardier Global Express Jet for face-to-face meetings.

Anthony Pratt

Age: 60

Lives: Melbourne

Estimated wealth: $16.95bn

Source: Visy and Pratt Industries

Secrets of success: Focusing on making boxes for food manufacturers and online retailers

Source: The List - Australia’s Richest 250

With that ruled out, Pratt has quickly adopted Zoom video conferencing software as a way of staying in touch with existing and meeting prospective customers, and he says it has helped him manage a business which is growing quickly.

“Zoom allows me to cover more ground. So instead of flying around America for, at most, two customer calls per day, now I can do five customer calls for three hours from 4am to 7am in Melbourne and then do a day’s work in Australia.

“Of course it is always better in person — there’s no substitute for elbow bumps in person — but it is amazing how much you can do that you would not have otherwise done had this whole thing not happened. I’m continually doing customers calls.”

Pratt says his typical day now is getting up at 3am, exercising on the treadmill for 20 minutes and then making those calls from 4am onwards. He does about 35 hours of Zoom calls a week, and says one bonus of being in Australia has been having all his meals with his family at home.

The country’s richest person, Pratt says Visy in Australia and Pratt Industries in the US are “booming” during COVID-19 and he is investing more in his firms’ expansion as the manufacturing of boxes for home deliveries and food packaging rises and rises.

“The food industry for a box-making company weathers all cycles,” Pratt tells The Australian.

“The two things that have boomed for us are selling packaging to people who sell online … and the food industry.

“People are spending a higher percentage of their income on food at the moment.

“So I see huge growth in the digital space and in food manufacturing.”

“Many of the great companies in the US now are in the digital space, and therefore you have to be part of it and packaging lends itself to that digital space. We sell boxes to Amazon, we sell to Woolworths, Walmart and Coles. These are the big boys in the online space.”

Pratt owns Visy with his sisters Heloise Pratt and Fiona Geminder, and owns Pratt Industries himself. This gave Pratt and his family an estimated wealth of $16.95bn for this year’s edition of The List — Australia’s Richest 250.

The two companies last year combined for a record 12 months, achieving about $1.49bn in pre-tax profits from $7bn revenue.

Given the market conditions, can Pratt’s companies beat their 2019 performance in terms of sales? He says yes, and points to statistics including online grocery ordering in the US by stay-at- home consumers increasing from $US1bn in February to more than $US5bn per month in April.

Pratt Industries has increased its advertising in recent months, giving Pratt himself a bigger presence in the media. “Now CEOs of big American companies take my calls. I open at CEO level with the customer and then the Pratt/Visy sales team and top management close at purchasing department level, because without a close there is no deal.

“We are adding more people too. Our 15,000 (employees) are growing. We are building a new $US150m factory in Pennsylvania, which is breaking ground in September. We are building an adjoining corrugated box factory next to our (Ohio) paper mill, and we’ve also just put another $20m investment at Conyers. We’ve also got another four of five corrugated projects around America we are doing.”

Pratt says he typically spends $500m on machinery annually, a strategy helped by President Trump’s tax cuts and accelerated depreciation allowances for capital expenditure.

Unsurprisingly he is an advocate for its introduction in Australia and for super funds to lend more money to business as pension funds and insurance companies do in the US.

“There’s a wall of money looking for a home. And we certainly might accelerate (our growth). Nobody knows what will happen during this period definitively, but at the moment we are booming.”