Sir Ronald Alfred Brierley is a New Zealand born investor and corporate raider, chairman and director of a number of companies in Australia, New Zealand and the UK. He founded "R. A. Brierley Investments" in March 1961 with no capital. By 1984 BIL was the largest company in New Zealand by market capitalization, and in 1987 had 160,000 shareholders, with a stake in over 300 companies, including Paris department store Galleries Lafayette and Air New Zealand.
Brierley began his career as the publisher of a horse racing tip sheet. He followed this with an investment analysis newsletter "Stocks and Shares" which he founded in 1956 at age 19. This sought to identify undervalued special situations and suggest what could be done with the companies. His first bid via R.A.Brierley Investments Ltd was for the Otago Farmers Co-Operative Association in July 1961, which had become attractive as a target due to its cheapness, its unusual legal structure and the company being moved to an unofficial NZX bourse due to failing to comply with exchange listing requirements. While Brierley's offer was rejected, the company was forced into a change in policy and the market price of the company leapt upwards. Other targets of Brierley's activist investment style in the 1960s and 1970s included the Southern Cross Building Society, the Finance Corporation of New Zealand, Citizens and Graziers and the Southern Farmers Co-operative Ltd in Australia. Many of these companies shares similar traits in that they were largely family controlled, inefficient, with lazy balance sheets, complacent management and surplus assets. Brierley's view was that his holding company, Brierley Investments Ltd, was "a monitoring organisation that continually evaluated the performance of various companies and acted as a catalyst to promote the most effective ownership of a company."
Post BIL
On 29 March 1990 Brierley was appointed chairman of investment holding company Guinness Peat Group. As chairman Brierley publicly attacked and defeated the plan to merge the London Stock Exchange with Deutsche Börse in 2001. In December 2015 Brierley, through his new company, Mercantile Investments, launched a hostile takeover of Australian shipping company Richfield International.
Quotes
"Ron is direct – he likes to call a spade, a spade." Blake Nixon, GPG's managing director
"Ron and Gary Weiss don't often come second when they fight, and when they do, they usually walk away with a lot of money." – Investment banker
