What was changed
Richard Pratt was the archetypal immigrant industrialist: his family fled Danzig in 1938, his father Leon sold light cardboard boxes to Shepparton fruit growers, and Richard built Visy into a $5 billion recycling and packaging group and one of Australia's biggest philanthropic vehicles. Then came the fall. A price-fixing scandal engulfed the group in 2007-08; Pratt handed back his Order of Australia, and criminal charges for misleading the competition regulator were dropped only because of his terminal illness. He died of cancer at 74 in April 2009.
The succession had quietly been settled long before. Anthony Pratt moved to Atlanta in 1991 to start Pratt Industries with about $100 million in revenue, then spent two decades building the group's US supply chain of recycled-paper mills, box factories and recycling plants. When his father died the division was clear: Anthony took the core Visy and Pratt businesses, while brothers-in-law took canning and the investment vehicle. The heir already ran the group's most competitive asset - a 100% recycled packaging system inside the world's biggest box market.
Rather than retrench under the scandal's shadow, Anthony doubled down on the United States. Pratt Industries opened a $250 million containerboard mill in Valparaiso, Indiana in 2016 and a $275 million mill in Wapakoneta, Ohio in 2019, and pledged another $2 billion of US investment over ten years. In Australia he announced a $2 billion program creating 5,000 jobs alongside the prime minister. By 2020 Pratt Industries was America's fifth-largest corrugated packaging company and group sales exceeded $6.5 billion.
What it achieved
Pratt Industries rose to America's fifth-largest corrugated packager; group sales passed $6.5B by 2020, with $525M of new recycled-paper mills in Indiana and Ohio alone.
Why it worked
The US arm was already his: 28 years running the Atlanta operation gave the heir a power base no relative could contest.
Recycling was the group's differentiator, and doubling down on 100% recycled mills turned a scandal-tainted incumbent into a sustainability story.
Private family ownership meant investment did not need the approval of public markets, so he could build mills through downturns.
The high-profile Australian jobs program bought political goodwill that lowered the reputational cost of the family name.
What can be applied
An heir who already ran the hardest, farthest piece of the family business inherits legitimacy: Anthony had spent nearly two decades building the US arm before he had to take the whole.
Aftermath
By 2017 the ABC described Anthony Pratt as Australia's richest man, worth $12.59 billion. The Australian program was set to take total Visy investment to $8 billion over a decade, and the US business pledged a further $2 billion. In 2020 PaperAge named him Executive Papermaker of the Year for building what it called one of the world's largest privately held, 100% recycled paper and packaging companies, employing 9,000 people in the US and 5,500 in Australasia.
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