Sir Eion Edgar, 73, says he bought his first shares when he was 12 years old, a stake in CRA, an earlier incarnation of Rio Tinto, for 10 pounds and 10 shillings that he finally sold for $7000 when he was 25.
He had just married Lady Jan and used the money to pay for a round-the-world trip for them.
“I followed my late father – he loved investing. There wasn’t many days when our post box at home didn’t have annual reports or half-yearly reports,” Sir Eion says.
When his father died, he had accumulated shares in about 300 companies all over the world.
“He had two shares in Rolls Royce and one in Nestle. He loved Walt Disney and Donald Duck so he bought three shares.”
Because Walt Disney liked to have bonus issues, that added up to 156 shares by the time he died, Sir Eion says.
So it was hardly surprising that he pursued a career in stock broking, working for Forsyth Barr in the holidays until he graduated and then joining an earlier incarnation of what is now Craig Investment Partners before returning to Forsyth Barr.
He says he does still work, although he’s stepped down as Forsyth Barr’s chairman after 20 years and become the firm’s “ambassador,” cutting his working week with the firm in half to just 10 hours now.
Sir Eion says he now devotes that extra 10 hours to his many charitable interests including chairing the New Zealand Dementia Prevention Trust, being a patron of Diabetes New Zealand and a number of sporting organisations.
He is gradually relinquishing a number of roles to his three sons – Hamish, the middle son, has run the day-to-day affairs of the family business, Sinclair Investment Group, for a number of years now, while Jonty, the eldest, and Adam, the youngest, both work for Forsyth Barr.
But he still chairs Sinclair’s major investment, the Hawaiki Submarine Cable which, at the time of writing, was planning its official launch in June.
The more than 15,000 kilometre fibre-optic cable business connecting New Zealand to Australia and the United States completed its final splice in May and will add 43 terabytes to the country’s internet capacity.
So with more than 60 years investment history, which investment does he rate as his best?
Sir Eion says it was Mr Chips, the previously NZX-listed company that was taken private by US-based Simplot in 2008 and then returned to New Zealand ownership in 2013 when Balle Bros Group bought it.
While the returns were handsome – the family business reaped about $38m from selling its 53% stake in the potato processor to Simplot – the company had a bit of a chequered career as a listed company.
Sir Eion explains that was due to competition arriving in the form of McCains, which slashed prices. “They tried to run us out of business but we had a lower manufacturing cost than they had so we managed to survive.”
Photo: Adrian Malloch