The commodity king
"People like us. " Making textiles in the United States sounds crazy given the industry's history of mill closures and layoffs, but Ross insists there will always be some textile businesses here. "But it will only be the people that are very low cost and that also have the best technology," he says. To that end, he's developing fabrics that incorporate nanotechnologies to make clothes that are stain and static resistant.
Ross's investing theory is that trade liberalization will lead to rising living standards in the developing world--and increased demand for commodities. "Hard metals, energy sources, and things of that sort are all going to be very much in demand for quite some time," he says. "Those are industries that have historically not attracted that much capital, haven't been that appealing to hotshot managers, and tend to be very fragmented. For people like us, those are very exciting characteristics."
But just any dying industry won't do. While airlines are certainly distressed and out of favor, and fares are becoming commoditized, Ross hasn't been able to come up with a workable strategy there, so the former airline analyst has stayed away.
Between analyzing airlines for Faulkner, Dawkins & Sullivan in the 1970s and launching WL Ross & Co. in 2000, Ross worked at Rothschild Inc. There, he and his team restructured over $200 billion of corporate liabilities.
Of course, anyone betting on globalization had better have China on the brain, and Ross certainly does. "I think China is the most amazing industrial revolution the world has ever seen," he says. "We're at the very early stages of China's expansion." With its insatiable demand for coal and steel, as well as its massive pool of textile workers and consumers, China figures prominently in his investment strategies.
Ross, 67, admits that he tends to obsess about the Asian giant: "My wife sometimes accuses me of being the Manchurian candidate; she thinks I'm totally brainwashed about China." That's his third wife, by the way. In October, Ross married Hilary Geary, a society writer for Quest magazine--the same month he closed the $4.5 billion deal with Mittal and purchased Horizon Natural. "It was," he says, "a wonderful October."
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