Richard Byles: the savvy deal maker

Today the Jamaica Observer publishes the 10th of 12 stories on the nominees for this year’s Business Leader Award being held under the theme “Business Leader: Executive Steward”. The nominees are among the top CEOs in Jamaica.

The past 25 years have been a mixed bag for our financial sector.

Pull back the curtain on the two-and-a-half decades and it yields the indelible scars of watershed moments.

Sagicor Group Jamaica is the end-product of the tectonic forces that shaped the decades and beyond. It is the brand that emerged once the dust settled on the multiplicity of mergers, buyouts, partnerships, takeovers and asset disposals that permanently remodelled the local economy.

Richard Byles is the human equivalent of Sagicor. From the mid-1980s this corporate leader has been in the driver’s seat of one company or the other. He is the one who steered the institutions under his custody clear of the pitfalls that imperilled the fortunes of others that lacked his steady hands at their wheels.

It is hardly surprising that the Barbadian investors, in search of a CEO to run Life of Jamaica (LOJ) would have turned to Byles, they having taken a 49 per cent stake and effective control of the local insurer in 2003.

Byles, as it turned out, was the astute executive who had played a major role in preserving many of the institutions that were later merged with LOJ and which enhanced its appeal to the shareholders of Sagicor Financial Corporation of Barbados.

The CEO inherited a company that had market value of $9.9 billion and which posted net profit of $1.2 billion for the full year preceding his appointment.

He spent 13 years at the helm, retiring in April this year. Under his stewardship, Sagicor, a funny-sounding moniker to the average Jamaican ear, nevertheless became a household brand throughout the breadth and depth of the country.

The raw statistics and the management achievements that they undergird are suggestive of why the name Sagicor is now among the island’s most identifiable corporate brands.

The breathtaking data include the $150 billion in market capitalisation that Byles handed over to his successor, Christopher Zacca, in April. This meant that the company doubled its original market value on average each of the 13 years that Byles was its CEO.

Of course, the market value would have hewed closely to the bottom line performance that the enterprise churned out annually, and this too represented a mind boggling feat.

Byles, a man who is not given to singing his own praise, was hard-pressed to point to this achievement.

“Driving this stock market performance is 17 years of increased profit every year,” he remarks. “I am not sure if any other listed company has done better.”

Even if others had equalled or exceeded this performance, it would hardly have diminished the impressive achievement.

At balance sheet date, Sagicor held an asset portfolio worth $360 billion and had off-balance sheet custody of another $260 billion in pensioners’ savings. In 2016, stockholders enjoyed a 22 per cent return on their average equity when the enterprise posted net income of $11.2 billion. The profit represented an eleven-fold increase over the net income generated in 2003, and the return on equity was multiples of what investors could have secured if they had opted to park their cash in fixed deposit instruments.

“That puts Sagicor in a unique and special place in the Jamaican economy and business community,” Byles stresses. “It makes us the largest owner of equities on the JSE (Jamaica Stock Exchange) and the largest owner of commercial real estate in Jamaica. With 2,200 hotel rooms in Jamaica and Florida Sagicor is a major player in the tourism business and one of Jamaica’s biggest US dollar earners. In our financial companies and hotels we employ more than 5,200 persons.”

http://www.jamaicaobserver.com/news/richard-byles-the-savvy-deal-maker_118012?profile=1373