The North West's working rich seem to be surviving the twin perils of stock market uncertainty and manufacturing slowdown rather well. The collective wealth of what we term the 100 top working rich in our area comes out at a healthy £38.4bn.
This year we have adjusted our annual rich list and ditched the aristocrats, the footballers and the pop stars of past lists to concentrate on the real wealth creators - not just creating their own wealth, but the jobs and profits on which the whole community can thrive.In the run-up to compiling this list, it seemed that the whole aura of doom and gloom emanating from the press and pundits alike would leave us short of candidates and certainly a much lower threshold than the £325m we have managed to achieve.
But the inherent strength of the North Western economy - its diversity, its rela-tive sanity during the crazy dotcom period and the prudence of its entrepreneurs and millionaire business owners - meant that the casualties were far fewer than we anticipated. True there have been some heavy losses. Dave Whelan at JJB Sports has seen his share price crash recently following a profits warning, but despite the loss of £3200m from his coffers, he still has £3240m of assets in the family.
This is nothing like as bad as some of the mainly London and South East based 90 per cent clubbers - those who have seen 90 per cent or more cut from their paper fortunes since the stock market peak in early 2000. The biggest loser this year though is our number one, the Matalan boss John Hargreaves, who may still be sitting pretty with £3825m of personal wealth. But that is £3525m down on a year ago - or £31.4m a day worse off.
Several - including some manufacturers - have reported strong profits growth for 2001, the latest accounts they have published in many cases. Tribute should be paid here to the work of the Rayner family in building up Lakeland Limited, the Lakes- based household goods group.
In an area blighted by foot and mouth and the collapse of tourism last year, its contri-bution to the local economy has been vital. With profits up from £36m to £38.5m on sales of £385m in 2001, Lakeland is becoming a substantial business by anyone's reckoning. More importantly locally, its staff numbers grew from 726 to 840 in 2001.
Judging by what they take out of the businesses, the North Western rich are paragons of financial virtue at a time when many executives on both sides of the Atlantic are being castigated for their greed in taking huge salaries and bonuses as their companies' share prices collapse.
Indeed, the biggest salary we have found among our 100 is the highest paid director of the Travellers Tales computer games operation - who we assume to be Jon Burton, the 33- year old owner. Southport based Burton took home £32.79m in 2001, but as he owns the business outright and has built it up rapidly, few can begrudge him the rewards. He has also had the good sense in 2001 (unlike some of the disgraced American executives from Enron and WorldCom) to cut his cloth according to his circumstances. With a slight dip in 2001, Burton actually cut his salary from £33.98m the previous year.
Geographically, Manchester - flush with the success of the Commonwealth Games - still has the highest numbers of working millionaires in the list. Twenty seven of the 100 have Manchester based businesses. Cheshire is a distant second with 17 and Merseyside comes in third with just 14 of the 100. The rest are scattered in between some of the mill towns, the Lakes and the Fylde coast.
Encouragingly, the numbers of self- made people who have started their business stands at 67 in our list - exactly two- thirds of the total, which augers well for the survival of the enterprise culture in these difficult times. If the North West's working rich can survive the current climate, they should be able to survive anything else thrown at them - and prosper mightily if conditions do improve on the national and world stage - which is good news for those of us who work for them or who benefit from their spending or tax revenues.
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Also in: September 2002
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