London – In a move further accelerating the shift of fortune away from his biggest asset, James Dyson’s technology firm has transferred a total of £1.3 billion (S$2.4 billion) to his family office since 2020.
A dividend of £400 million was paid last year by Dyson Holdings to Weybourne Holdings, a single-family office responsible for managing Mr Dyson’s wealth. This was reported to be the largest annual cash payout, as noted by registry filings.
Welbourne received another £200 million from the closely held maker of bagless vacuum cleaners and £700 million through share capital transfers in January, reported Bloomberg on Friday (Oct 29).
“The family is, in effect, diversifying its interests,” said Sheffield University Management School professor of accounting practice Richard Murphy.
According to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, Mr Dyson is the richest person in the United Kingdom, with a net worth of about US$26 billion (S$35 billion).
His technology company operates in Asia, Europe and the United States, most of his fortune coming from his shares in his namesake firm.
From nearly US$1 million in debt to a name that has become a household staple, Mr Dyson has shared his life story and numerous inventions in his new memoir, Invention: A Life.
As a young entrepreneur and inventor, Mr Dyson has gone through numerous projects such as the sea truck, ballbarrow (a wheelbarrow with a ball instead of a wheel), and the vacuum.
When asked by Fast Company if there was a rule of thumb he followed when choosing to invest in his own tech or sourcing them from third-party manufacturers, giving them a piece of the pie, Mr Dyson said it depends on the rate of progress.
“We were sourcing electric motors from electric motor manufacturers, and we could see they weren’t making any progress, they weren’t changing it, and I’d had this dream for quite a long time of making ultra-high-speed electric motors so they could be much smaller and lighter,” he said.
On the unreleased Dyson car, which he hoped would become a zero-emissions car, Mr Dyson said they didn’t learn a lot from the suspended project due to the difference in industries.
“The car business is so different, and car engineering is so different. The greatest thing we got from it was some more wonderful engineers who’ve come into our existing business. And I think, in the long term, 500 million pounds wasted on the car project, in the long term we’ll get it back through that injection of talent.”
In addition to the transfers to the family office in 2020, Weybourne also received dividends and capital transfers worth £465 million in 2019 and £300 million in 2018. In 2019, Dyson Holdings announced it would relocate its headquarters from Britain to Singapore to put more focus on the Southeast Asia region.
The shift in money resulted in an increase in borrowings by about £300 million, noted Bloomberg.
Weybourne was established in 2013, with assets worth £4.5 billion as of 2019. Its portfolio includes real estate, farming and public markets, employing more than two dozen employees in Britain and Singapore.
Mr Dyson is the largest landowner in England, using that real estate for farming. Reports noted he oversaw 257.8ha of woodland and about 150 homes.
Despite the business not being highly profitable for him, he notes it is more of a passion project.
“I wanted to do it because I grew up on farms; I didn’t own a farm, but I worked on them in a heavily agricultural area, a rather beautiful agricultural area. So, I wanted to do it because I saw it as another form of manufacturing, and it’s a wonderful thing to do, to produce food. It feeds the nation; it’s an important thing to do, so that’s why I did it,” he told Fast Company.
In 2020, Dyson Holding’s saw a 12 per cent increase in profit of £797 million and revenue increasing 5.7 per cent to £5.7 billion./TISG
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