Swedish billionaire Stefan Persson.
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Stefan Persson, the son of H&M’s founder, owns a 19,000-acre country estate in southern England.The estate rears cattle, farms crops, brews beer, and serves punters in its 300-year-old pub.Persson, formerly CEO of H&M, is Sweden’s richest person with a $17.3 billion fortune.
Swedish fashion magnate Stefan Persson, the billionaire son of H&M’s founder, owns a sprawling 19,000-acre country estate in southern England.
As well as letting out properties, farming wheat and barley, and rearing cattle, the estate has its own pub, brewery, distillery, and oil press.
Persson is currently the richest person in Sweden and the 101st-richest in the world, with a net worth of $17.3 billion, per estimates by the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. His father Erling Persson founded a women’s clothing store called Hennes in 1947, which later became Hennes & Mauritz.
Stefan joined the company as head of UK operations in 1976 and then succeeded his father as CEO in 1982. Stefan stepped down in 1998 and became the company’s chairman, a role he left in May 2020.
Persson and his family are H&M’s largest shareholders, who via their family office – Ramsbury Invest AB – hold 53.4% of all shares and 77.3% of the votes.
In 1997, Persson splurged some of his fortunes on a 3,000-acre country estate in Wiltshire, southern England, which went on to become Ramsbury Estates. Over the years it bought up neighboring estates and swelled to its current size of 19,000 acres.
Ramsbury Estates has about 7,000 acres of farmland, with a focus on wheat and barley alongside a small herd of cattle. It also has more than 2,500 acres of woodland and forestry, including a river where it offers fishing, especially trout.
The estate has more than 100 cottages and houses, some of which date back to the mid-18th century, and it says they’re let “to a wide range of tenants from single farm workers right up to large, bustling families.”
Persson also owns a pub – The Bell in Ramsbury, a former coaching inn that is more than 300 years old and has 10 bedrooms and a restaurant.
Ramsbury Estates has its own pub.
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Like many modern farms, Ramsbury Estates has diversified. It set up a brewery in 2004, a distillery in 2014, and an oil press in 2015, and as well as selling what it produces from these – its cheapest gin and vodka cost £29.50 (about $37) for a 70-centiliter bottle or 24 fluid ounces – the estate offers tours of the brewery and distillery for £20 (about $25) a head. The estate’s own beers and spirits are also served up in the pub.
“Diversification into new income streams is still being actively considered, to ensure stability of future revenue, whilst staying consistent with the ethos of the estate as a whole,” Ramsbury Estates wrote in its 2022 strategic report.
The estate brews beers and distills spirits.
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On its website, the estate highlights the sustainability of its operations.
Persson is listed as the company’s sole director, though he doesn’t receive any remuneration for his role. Financial filings show that last year it had about 80 members of staff.
The company posted £5.75 million (about $7.1 million) in revenue in the first nine months of 2022, the most recent period for which earnings data is available. About three-quarters came from farming and crops. About 13% came from its pub and restaurant, 9% from its agency, 3% from its woodland, 2% from rental properties, and a small proportion from smokehouse and oil sales. Ramsbury Estates declined to comment on exactly what the “agency” portion of its business is comprised of.
The H&M Group, which has about 150,000 employees globally and 4,500 stores, posted sales of 223 billion Swedish krona (about $20 billion) last year. As well as H&M, it also owns brands such as COS, & Other Stories, and Monki.