Brazilian Billionaire Lemann Shows Off His Tennis Skills in Finance Event
Brazilian Billionaire Lemann Shows Off His Tennis Skills in Finance Event
(Bloomberg) -- Brazilian billionaire Jorge Paulo Lemann, 79, gave an audience of around 9,000 people a display of skills he rarely shows in public: His tennis-playing mojo.
Lemann, a silver-haired former professional tennis player, was challenged by another Brazilian billionaire Guilherme Benchimol, the founder of retail investment platform XP Investimentos, to a mock tennis match on stage at an XP-hosted event in Sao Paulo, following an hour-long discussion between the two. Benchimol, 42, who also wanted to be a tennis player growing up, brought the rackets.
Playing tennis was not all they did on Saturday morning. Lemann once again acknowledged the missteps of his private equity firm, 3G Capital Partners Ltd., in its Kraft Heinz venture, calling it a “failure”. The packaged-food giant that Lemann’s 3G created with Warren Buffett in a 2015 merger has been under fire from critics for failing to keep up with consumers’ tastes. It took a $15.4 billion writedown in February.
“The big dream we had for Kraft Heinz didn’t pan out the way we expected,” he said. “It’s not possible anymore to build something in the food business like we did in the beer business. We tried, it didn’t work and we’ll fix it.”
Lemann said he has a lot to learn from the consumer-focused culture of XP Investimentos, the digital investment platform bringing products that were previously only available to ultra-rich clients to Brazil’s middle class. And that he’s been trying to keep up with technological changes, saying he invested in three Brazilian-created unicorns: payments firm StoneCo, credit-card firm Brex and a holding company for different apps called Movile.
“I’m no longer a frightened dinosaur. I’m a moving dinosaur,” he said, adding he’s been trying to “update himself” for the digital world, “if not, I’ll be an extinct dinosaur.”
Read more: Billionaire Lemann Says He’s a ‘Dinosaur’ Keeping Up With Tech
His 3G Capital has around a $10 billion commitment from investors for a new fund and Lemann said it has abandoned plans for a new acquisition to merge with Kraft Heinz, and is now looking at the technology sector, among others, but with nothing imminent in sight.
Lemann’s love of tennis has also taught him a few business lessons. “Playing tennis has taught me how to lose, you can’t win them all. And when you lose you have to analyze what went wrong and how to improve next time,” Lemann said.
A lesson he had no need to relearn on Saturday: He won, 3 points to 2.
To contact the reporter on this story: Felipe Marques in Sao Paulo at fmarques10@bloomberg.net
To contact the editors responsible for this story: Michael J. Moore at mmoore55@bloomberg.net, Bruce Douglas
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