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James Goldsmith, 39, is a true multinational man. Born in Paris of a British father and a French mother, he speaks both languages fluently, divides his time between homes in England and France, and holds passports of both nations. Goldsmith's $1.4 billion-a-year Cavenham Foods empire—Europe's third largest food processor after Unilever and Nestlé—also straddles the English Channel.
He started cooking up his empire of edibles in 1965, when he catered to both the sweet tooth and the weight-consciousness of Britons by forming Cavenham Foods as a diversified maker of candy and diet products. Following the recipes of Jim Slater and other British takeover specialists, Goldsmith began buying troubled foodmakers and selling off their undervalued surplus assets. He surprised British financiers by buying Bovril, maker of Britain's best-known beef extract, for $50 million in June 1971. Since then the price of Cavenham shares has tripled.
Goldsmith claims to have learned the art of management from the mistakes of U.S. multinationals. "Americans tended to look at Europe as a single market, but that is an oversimplification," he says. "When it comes to food, every market has totally different tastes." He tells French cheesemakers to forget about trying to sell their Camembert and Pont-l'Evêque in Britain, and learn how to make the Cheddars and Stiltons favored by British palates. Goldsmith also avoids what he sees as the pitfall of American-style conglomeration by keeping the bulk of his expansion in the food business. Lately he has been adding to his already large interests in banks, insurance companies and property-development firms, but the newcomers will be used to help provide cash for the acquisition of more Common Market food companies. There should be plenty of reserves; earnings from Goldsmith's varied interests this year are expected to be about $50 million.
Jean of All Trades
Jean Saint-Geours, 47, is professor of political economy at the Institut d'Études Politiques de Paris, where he lectures from his own 500-page textbook. He is the author of four novels and a nonfiction book, Long Live the Consumer Society. He is an avid cross-country runner, swimmer and tennis player, and a former member of the national championship rugby team. He speaks fluent English, Spanish, German and Italian, and reads Latin.
He also finds time to be a banker. As managing director of Crédit Lyonnais, the eighth largest bank in the world (assets: $15.7 billion), Saint-Geours is a proponent of the European movement toward multinational banking consortiums. The bank's two-year-old union with Germany's Commerzbank and Italy's Banco di Roma to form the CCB group is one of at least seven major liaisons; their main purpose is to provide big, convenient pools of capital in different currencies to help international firms expand. The CCB group commands assets of nearly $31 billion.