took chin

Michael Lee-Chin

Michael Lee-Chin (born 1951) is a Jamaican-Canadian investor. He is the founder and Chairman of Portland Holdings Inc., a privately held investment company which owns a collection of diversified operating in sectors that include media, tourism, health care telecommunications and financial services. Amongst other positions, he is currently Executive Chairman of AIC Limited (a Canadian mutual fund), and the National Commercial Bank of Jamaica. In the latest Forbes Billionaires List, he was placed at number 677, with assets worth around $1.8 billion. (Though Lee-Chin's wealth has been as high as $2.6 billion in the past.) Canadian Business has named him as one of the richest people in Canada.

Background

Early life

Lee-Chin was born in Port Antonio, Jamaica in 1951. Both his parents were biracial, Black and Chinese, Jamaicans. When Lee-Chin was aged 7, his mother married Vincent Chen. Chen also had a son from a previous relationship, and the couple had a further 7 children together, including 6 boys and 1 girl. His mother sold Avon products, and worked as a book-keeper for various local firms, while his stepfather ran a local grocery store. He attended the local high school, Titchfield High, between 1962 and 1969.

His first job came in 1965 working as part of the landscaping team at the Frenchman's Cove Hotel. In 1966 he got a summer job working on the Jamaica Queen cruise ship, cleaning the engine room.

Introduction

In 1970 he went to Canada on a scholarship program sponsored by the Jamaican Government to study Civil Engineering at McMaster University, and graduated in 1974. During the 8th Annual Kumon Instructor Conference Meeting 2007 in Toronto, he says that he personally met the Jamaican Prime Minister, Hugh Lawson Shearer, to request a grant for his studies. In the first year at the University, he was spending by his own money. After the first summer, he requested for the scholarship.

Career

He worked briefly as a road engineer for the Jamaican Government, but unable to find work in his qualified field (and allegedly, because his Canadian wife didn't like living in Jamaica), he returned to Canada. At first he worked as a bouncer, but later found employment as a financial advisor for Investors Group.

He spent two years at the Investors Group, in the Hamilton, Ontario office and in 1979, moved to Regal Capital Planners and became regional manager. Whilst at the company, in 1983, he secured a loan from the Continental Bank of Canada for C$500,000 to purchase a stake in Mackenzie Financial Group. By 1987, the investment was worth C$3.5 million.

In 1987, took the proceeds from his Mackenzie investment and he bought a Kitchener-based company called the Advantage Investment Council (a division of AIC Limited) for $200,000. At the time, the company had holdings of around C$800,000. He renamed the company AIC, and developed it to a fund that today controls around C$6 Billion, with hundreds of thousands of investors.

Following the acquisition of AIC Limited, Lee-Chin set up the Berkshire group of companies – comprising an investment planning arm, a securities dealership and an insurance operation. By 2007, Berkshire amassed for than C$12 billion of assets under administration. In 2007, Manulife acquired Berkshire from Portland Holdings in exchange for shares, making Portland one of the largest shareholders of Manulife.

Investments 1990 - 2005

In the late 1980s, AIC suffered from a collapse in the real estate market, in which it had invested. It recovered throughout the early 1990s by maintaining investments in large groups, such as Merrill Lynch and TD bank (formerly Toronto Dominion). This caused investments to grow from US$8 million in 1990 to nearly US$8 billion by 1998.

However, Lee-Chin was reluctant to invest in the dotcom boom, and saw AIC investments lose 8 per cent in value, even as the S&P gained 56 per cent. Investors moved US$224 million out of AIC's flagship 'Advantage Mutual Fund'. The Globe and Mail ran an article predicting even more investors to leave the fund, meaning that they would run out of cash and be forced to sell its core holdings. Lee-Chin's response was to sell stock in Coca-Cola, and invest US$65 million into Mackenzie Holdings (the same firm in which he had invested US$400,000 16 years previously). Letters were sent to all 350,000 investors, explaining the strategy. The investors were calmed by the purchase, and the stock was later sold to Investor Group (the same company Lee-Chin had worked for in the 1980s) at more than twice the price AIC had paid for it. In 2000 and 2001, following the dotcom crash, AIC outperformed the market with 26 per cent growth and 4 per cent decline respectively.

In November 2003, AIC was part of a regulatory investigation involving 105 Canadian mutual funds companies. In it’s review of AIC, investigators found no evidence of late trading and market timing activity by AIC staff or in any of its funds. It did find however, market timing carried out by certain third party investors in AIC Funds. For this, the OSC fined AIC US$58.8 million for its involvement.

On October 5, 2006, Lee-Chin announced his resignation as CEO of AIC, to be replaced by Jonathan Wellum, AIC's chief investment officer. He remains AIC’s Executive Chairman.

In 2005, two investment product managers offering structured products joined the Portland Holdings portfolio, Copernican Capital Corporation has offered retail investment products, primarily sold by brokers, and has raised more than C$300 million since its launch. Markland Street Asset Management, which launched the Oil Sands Sector Fund, raised C$430 million in one of Canada’s largest closed-end IPOs.

Private life

In 1974, he married Vera Lee-Chin, a Ukrainian Canadian that he had met at University. They parted in 1991, and officially separated (though did not divorce) in 1997. Ms. Lee-Chin has since contested the separation, claiming that Lee-Chin did not disclose his actual wealth at the time of the separation. The couple had three children (Michael Jr., Paul, and Adrian).

Lee-Chin now lives with Sonya Hamilton, with whom he has fraternal-twin daughters, in Flamborough, near Hamilton, Ontario.

Current fund growth and difficulties

Investment in Caribbean

In the late 1990s and early 2000s, Jamaica went through a period of financial crisis. Lee-Chin saw potential in his native country, and Portland purchased 75 per cent of the National Commercial Bank of Jamaica for 6 billion Jamaican dollars (US$127 million) from the Jamaican Government.

In 2003, Senvia Money Services Inc., a global money transfer company was established. This was followed in 2004, by the acquisition of AIC Financial Group Limited, headquartered in Trinidad.

In 2004, he announced plans to set up the AIC Caribbean Fund with the intention of investing in the entire Caribbean region. The stated aim of the fund is to raise US$1 billion in order to "make investments in businesses located in countries of the Caribbean Community (CARICOM), with an emphasis on Jamaica, Barbados and Trinidad and Tobago". So far, it has made a number of large-scale investments.

In 2006, Portland acquired an 85 per cent controlling stake in the United General Insurance Company, the largest auto insurer in Jamaica, and renamed the firm Advantage General Insurance Company. A controlling interest in CVM Communications Group (consisting of radio and televison stations and newspapers) was purchased at the same time.

Portland partnered with Risley Group to form Columbus Communications Ltd. – a Barbadian corporation that holds controlling interest in a number of telecommunications providers in the Caribbean including Cable Bahamas Ltd. Caribbean Crossings Ltd., Merit Communications Ltd. And FibralLink Jamaica Ltd.

In the tourism sector, Michael guided Portland through a number of acquisitions in the Caribbean. Among them, the hospitality operations of the Trident Villas and Spa in Jamaica, Reggae Beach and Blue Lagoon. Portlands first acquisition in the health care industry sector was announced in July 2006, when Medical Associates Ltd., a privately held hospital in Kingston, Jamaica, joined the Portland Group.

Commodities boom

Similar to the experience of the late 1990s, Lee-Chin again has shied away from investing in commodities and the energy market boom. He has specifically stated that "We [AIC] do not like commodities-type businesses nor most high-tech companies simply because they are implicitly poor enterprises which we would not want to hold for the long term".

Again, this strategy has meant that AIC has significantly underperformed the S&P index, but Lee-Chin believes that the current boom is just another bubble. Lee-Chin describes the market since 1990 as "a series of rolling speculations", and now 'we see a commodities bubble'.

Business strategy

While at Investors Group, he studied the strategies of successful investors, such as Warren Buffett, Benjamin Graham and Kenneth Thomson. Their buy and hold strategy is easily recognisable in the motto of AIC - Buy, hold and prosper.

Accolades and awards

Lee-Chin has received various business awards, including:

Being placed on the Forbes Billionaires list since 2001. In 2006, he was placed at number 365.
In 2002, Lee-Chin received the 'Harry Jerome Award' for 'Business Leader of the Decade'
Time Magazine named Lee-Chin one of 'Canada's Heroes' in July 5, 2004.

He is also a generous philanthropist, and has donated to various causes, including:

C$5 million to McMaster University (which he attended)which awarded him an Honorary Degree in November 2003.

JMD$155 million (approx. USD $2.4 million) to Northern Caribbean University.

C$30 million to the Royal Ontario Museum which commissioned a new building named the Michael Lee Chin Crystal. Designed by Daniel Libeskind, it opened on June 2, 2007.
An unspecified amount of money that makes him one of the leading donors to Bill Clinton's William J. Clinton Presidential Foundation. He was appointed to the Board of Trustees for the fund in 2003.