Forbes Asia - June 2018

FORBES ASIA

FROM THE VAULT

TOM PENNINGTON/FORT WORTH STAR-TELEGRAM/MCT/GETTY IMAGES; CAMERIQUE/GETTY IMAGES

Slow to Develop: June 15, 1969

SHUTTERBUGS PRIZED Polaroids for their

instantaneousness. But the company’s founder,

Edwin Land, a Harvard-educated physicist, certainly

did not conduct business at lashbulb speed. He had

started Polaroid in 1937 and carefully built it up to

more than $240 million in sales (about $1.6 billion in

2018 dollars) by slowly reducing the bulk and price of

his cameras. he Polaroid Swinger, released in 1965,

was a breakthrough hit, selling 5 million units in two

years. (It cost $19.95, roughly $136 today.) Polaroid

had also experimented with photocopiers, but the

designs didn’t impress Land, and he steadfastly refused

to release them to the marketplace. “We do not want to

do what every Tom, Dick and Xerox can do,” said Land,

who at the time possessed a fortune equivalent to more

than $4 billion today. “We proceed from basic science

through applied science to highly desirable products.”

Polaroid’s plodding pace would ultimately lead to

its demise as it was let behind in the consumer shit to

digital cameras. It iled for bankruptcy in 2001, a decade

ater Land died, at age 81. Polaroid has since been resur-

rected, and in a bid to attract the kinds of customers who

have locked anew to vinyl records, last year it introduced a

$99.99 version of its instant-ilm camera.

NOTABLE AND

NEWSWORTHY

Wily Wyly

At 34, Sam Wyly was already

displaying the empire-building

strategy that would eventually

make him a billionaire for a

time: Buy up small companies

across a given industry and turn

them around. By the summer

of ’69 he had nabbed his latest

acquisition: Gulf Insurance.

AMAZING AD

Land of Machines

and Honeywell

Honeywell was determined

to make its 14-year-old

computer division a success.

Just a few weeks later,

its machines would help

astronauts reach the moon.

FROM THE EDITOR’S DESK

Pesticide Pestilence

In the 1950s Malcolm Forbes had lunch in Nassau, the

Bahamas, with an entrepreneur named James Rand,

who wouldn’t touch some ofered fruit. Rand wasn’t in

the chemicals business—he made typewriters—but after

watching his wife once fall ill from pesticide-laden food, he

assured Malcolm that “we [are] all slowly being poisoned

by pesticide.” Malcolm recounted the story in a 1969 column

that questioned why the U.S. hadn’t yet banned DDT.

FAST-FORWARD

Reel Problems

1969: Edgar Bronfman Sr.’s MGM was still struggling

to overcome silver-screen flops from years prior,

such as The Mutiny on the Bounty.

2018: Four years after Edgar Sr.’s death and almost

two decades after his son Edgar Jr. committed

his own entertainment blunder—selling the clan’s

Seagram Cos. to Vivendi—the only Bronfman on

Forbes’ billionaires list is Edgar Sr.’s brother, Charles.

BY ABRAM BROWN

60 | FORBES ASIA JUNE 2018