Wall Street Journal, Feb 9, 2019

choi

James R Hagerty, Ron Joyce; A cop bought a coffee shop and the result was no joke. (in the Obituaries section).
https://www.wsj.com/articles/whe ... thrived-11549639800

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A hockey player and a cop team up to sell doughnuts. Neither has much business experience. What could go wrong?

In the case of Canada's Tim Hortons fast-food chain, the combination proved surprisingly successful.

Tim Horton, a star for the Toronto Maple Leafs, and a business partner opened a coffee and doughnut shop in a converted gas station in Hamilton, Ontario, in 1964. It didn't take long for a local policeman, Ron Joyce, to notice.

Mr Joyce, who died Jan 31 at the age of 88, bought the first franchise in what became the Tim Hortons chain and in 1967 became a partner in the parent company with Mr Horton.

Less than two years after Mr Horton died in a 1974 car crash, Mr Joyce bought his widow's share of the business, which then had 48 outlets ['for about $1 million and assumed control of the full Tim Horton franchise']. He expanded the chain to more than 1,000 outlets before agreeing in 1995 to sell it to Wendy's International Inc for about $450 million of Wendy's stock.

He later regretted it. The price proved far too low, Mr Joyce said, and the new owner ignored his advice. Tim Hortons is now part of Restaurant Brands International Inc, which also operates Burger King and Popeyes.

For consolation, Mr Joyce had private jets, yachts, a champagne-colored Rolls-Royce and the Fox Harb's golf resort he built in northern Nova Scotia. His philanthropy, including summer camps for poor children, earned him an Order of Canada award.

Poverty was something he knew firsthand. Ronald Vaughn Joyce was born Oct `9, 1930, and grew up in the village of Tatamagouche, Nova Scotia. Three years later, his father, a construction worker, was killed by a barrel of oil that rolled out of a truck.

His mother was 23, had two children and was pregnant with a third. They moved into a house without electricity or running water. Ron was only so-so as a student and decided school was a waste of time. He dropped out of school at age 15, even though a girlfriend told him he would end up digging ditches, according to his 2006 memoir, "Always Fresh."

He got a job with a construction company and was put to work digging a drainage trench. 'I told you so,' the girlfriend said, when she saw him in the ditch.

Looking for steadier work, He moved [at 16: en.wikipedia.org] to Hamilton, Ontario, where he arrived broke after spending his last few dollars on beer. By 19, he was married and working in a factory. Two years later, he started a five-year hitch in the Canadian Navy [1951-1956, 'was trained as a wireless operator': Wikipedia], which taught him the Morse code and took him to ports from Korea to India.

Back in Hamilton, he joined the police force [1956-1965] but it was hard to support a growing family. He moonlighted as a truck driver and worked construction before finding something he liked better: Running a Dairy Queen ['in 1963 purchased a Dairy Queen franchise in Hamilton'].

In 1964, he spotted a former gas station that had been recently turned into a coffee and doughnut shop. After buying the franchise, he discovered it has no established recipes or operating procedures. The baker he inherited with the shop consulted a Ouija board to decide how much flour to use. By trial and error, Mr Joyce learned to make foughnuts and coffee with a consistent quality.

No coffee snob, he sought a middle-of-the-road brew, nade more tempting with a creamier cream than competitors used. The menu evolved to include soup. Some renegade franchises started serving croissant sandwiches, and they were so popular that the parent company imposed them across the chain.

While spreading across Canada, the chain opened its first US store in Pompano Beach, Fla [the northern neighbor of Fort Lauderdale], in 1981. Nearby, Mr Joyce checked out a rival chain featuring topless waitresses. He was pleased when one of those servers confided that the doughnuts were bought from Tim Hortons.

After selling the chain, Mr Joyce relished his ownership of the Fox Harb's golf resort. On the Northumberland Strait near his hometown [not Hamilton, but Tatamagouche]. "The economics don't make any sense, and they never will," he told the Globe and Mail in 2006.

While landing near the resort in 2007, Mr Joyce's Bombardier Global 5000 jet crashed, leaving him with fractured vertebrae and limiting his mobility for years. 'It scared the hell out of me,' he said shortly after the accident.

Mr Joyce's survivors include seven children, 10 grandchildren and six great-grandchildren. Forbes last year estimated his net worth t $1.4 billion.
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Note:
(a)
(i) Ron Joyce
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ron_Joyce
("In 1995 Wendy's and Tim Hortons merged with Joyce becoming the combined company's largest shareholder, though eventually the firms again separated. Joyce eventually sold his Wendy's stock and retired from managemen. * * * Joyce was married twice and both ended in divorce. His son Ron Jr. married Tim Horton's eldest daughter Jeri-Lyn. The couple are franchisees of two Tim Hortons locations in southern Ontario")

The contents of brackets are al from this Wiki page.
(ii) Joyce (name)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joyce_(name)

(b)
(i) Tim Horton
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_Horton
(1930 – 1974; a Canadian professional ice hockey player; section 5 Death and aftermath)
(ii) Hamilton, Ontario
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hamilton,_Ontario
about 60 km (37 miles) southwest of Toronto; home to McMaster University [1887- ; public; 'university bears the name of William McMaster, * * * who bequeathed C$900,000 to its founding': Wikipedia]; table: Named for George Hamilton pa merchant who founded Hamilton])
(iii)
(A) Dairy Queen
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dairy_Queen
(B) History. Long Island DW, undated
longislanddq.com/history/
("In January 1998, International Dairy Queen, Inc and its subsidiary companies were purchased by Berkshire Hathaway Inc.  IDQ is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Berkshire Hathaway Inc")
() Fox Harb'r Golf Resort & Spa
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fox_Harb%27r_Golf_Resort_%26_Spa
(2000- ; in Fox Harbour, Nova Scotia)

Fox or Foxx is an English surname, derived from the English noun fox.

(c) "Tim Horton, a star for the Toronto Maple Leafs, and a business partner opened a coffee and doughnut shop in a converted gas station in Hamilton, Ontario, in 1964. It didn't take long for a local policeman, Ron Joyce, to notice [that same year]."

Tim Hortons
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_Hortons
("known for its coffee and donuts * * * The company was founded in 1964 in Hamilton, Ontario, by Canadian hockey player Tim Horton (1930–1974) and Jim Charade (1934–2009), after an initial venture in hamburger restaurants. * * * [Its revenue or] sales also surpassed those of McDonald's Canadian operations as of 2002"
(d) "Some renegade franchises started serving croissant sandwiches, and they were so popular that the parent company imposed them across the chain."

The parent company offered them "in 1983," according to the same URL immediately below.

(e) "the chain opened its first US store in Pompano Beach, Fla, in 1981"
(i) Tim Timeline. In Our Story. Tim Hortons, undated
https://www.timhortons.com/us/en/corporate/our-story.php
("1984  The first US location in Tonawanda, NY, allowing Canadians to make cross-border coffee runs")

Tonawanda (city), New York
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tonawanda_(city),_New_York
("a city in Erie County" whose county seat is City of Buffalo)
(ii) "In 1981, the first US locations opened in Deerfield and Pompano Beach, Fla. Sales were dismal, so they closed soon after. But they wouldn’t be gone for long…"
Dan Myers, 13 Things You Didn't Know About Tim Hortons (Slideshow). The Daily Meal, Sept 4, 2014 (www.dailymeal.com)
(A) City of Deerfield, Fla is northern neighbor of City of Pompano Beach.
(B) "Its name is derived from the Florida pompano (Trachinotus carolinus), a fish found off the Atlantic coast."   en.wikipedia.org for "Pompano Beach, Florida"
(C) "a marine fishes in the genus Trachinotus * * * The Florida pompano, T carolinus, reaches about 45 cm (18 in) and 1.5 kg (3.3 lb)"  en.wikipedia.org for pompano.

(f) Tim Timeline in the same Web page (but you have to click different decades) also states
(i) "2006  Tim Hortons completes its initial public offering and officially becomes public on September 29, 2006, trading on the NYSE and the TSX ([ticker symbol:] THI)."
(ii) "2014  Burger King and 3G Capital acquire Tim Hortons and form the third-largest restaurant brand in the world, Restaurant Brands International."

1995 Ron Joyce sold Tim Hortons to Wendy's. 2008 Trian Fund Management of New York City (a hedge fund noted for its activist founder/investor) acquired Wendy's (whose founder Dave Thomas died in 2002), after 2005 having forced Wendy's to divest Tim Hortons in 2006. (Like KKR's 1989 leveraged buyout of RJR Nabisco, hedge funds see values, incur debt to purchased shares of a targeted public company, gain control of board of directors and then the company, and then carve up the company for individual sales of its units, in part to pay back the debt and in part to make money). Hence Tim Hortons was an independent company 2006-2014.

In 2004, 3G Capital was founded in New York City and take its name from the fact that the same THREE Brazilian founders had founded a Rio de Janeiro-based investment bank Banco Guarantia. 3G acquired Burger King in 2010.

"3G takes its name from the three Brazilians who once owned Garantia, an investment bank sold in 1998 to Credit Suisse. * * * Mr Buffett, widely regarded as the world's most successful investor, is an admirer [of 3G]. He helped finance 3G’s $13.3bn acquisition in 2014 of Tim Hortons, the doughnut chain, and invested alongside 3G in Heinz, then Kraft, through his Berkshire Hathaway investment group." Scheherazade Daneshkhu, Lindsay Whipp and James Fontanella-Khan, The Lean and Mean Approach of 3G Capital, Financial Times, May 7, 2017 (the report is free, but there is no need to read the rest).

"The 'G' in Guarantia contributes the 'G' in 3G Capital's name." Nick McCullum, Case Study: How 3G Capital Squeezed More out of Heinz. Sure Dividend, Sept 4, 2017.

The guarantia (Spanish noun feminine garantía; Spanish verb garantir) is Portuguese noun feminine for guarantee.

(g) "The economics don't make any sense, and they never will."  I do not know what it means. (About golf course or in general? Why presence of "the"?)  Globe and Mail does not have that report online, though another in 2007 about Joyce is.

choi

(2) Josh Chin, One World, Two Internets; As China and the West race for 5G dominance, two digital powers with very different approaches to technology are staking out their corners. (in the page B1, which is Business section that on Saturday becomes Exchange -- the name change occurred about half a year ago).
https://www.wsj.com/articles/the ... eground-11549688420

Quote:

(a) "The global internet is splitting in two.  One side, championed in China, is a digital landscape where mobile payments have replaced cash. Smartphones are the devices that matter, and users can shop, chat, bank and surf the web with one app. The downsides: The government reigns absolute, and it is watching—you may have to communicate with friends in code. And don't expect to access Google or Facebook.  On the other side, in much of the world, the internet is open to all. * * *

"The divide is clear to people like Tom Pellman who straddle it. Mr Pellman, a director in Washington, DC, for an international risk advisory firm, spent a decade in Beijing from the mid-2000s. His company doesn't use Slack, the messaging app, because China has blocked it. He circumvented the Great Firewall by circling through virtual private networks, or VPNs, which disguise activity from monitors until getting discovered and blocked, he said. 'It's Whac-A-Mole.'

"Beijing's censorship is like its polluted air, he said: 'You're in it and it seems OK,' then you leave and you realize how bad it was.' Yet he loved WeChat, the app that can do multiple tasks, and missed t when he left China. 'When I came back to the US it was like coming back to the Stone Age,' he said. 'Not being able to use WeChat, everything felt just old-fashioned.'

"These parallel universes have co-existed. In one, people buy goods on Amazon; in the other, it's Alibaba. In the West, Alphabet Inc's Google is so popular, it's a verb, but you can't google in China -- there's Baidu for that. In London, Apple Pay can get you on the Tube; on Beijing it's Alipay. To do all this in one app in China, there's WeChat [by Tencent], which lets a billion people also send texts, hail cabs and do many other tasks. * * * Outside China, though, these [Chinese] giants haven't had much success.

(c) "Outside China, the landscape is different. Alibaba has been an afterthought n many markets. Tencent has struggled to to expand WeChat overseas. Since January 2012, WeChat has been downloaded about 350 million times, from Apple's app store. world-wide, according to research firm Sensor Tower Inc. About 83% of those downloads come from users in China, according to Sensor Tower.

Note:
(a) Josh Chin. ChinaFile 中参馆 (published by Asia Society based in NYC), last updated on Nov 10, 2014
www.chinafile.com/contributors/josh-chin
("Josh Chin joined The Wall Street Journal in Beijing in 2007 * * * He has lived and worked in China since the year 2000, with a four-year hiatus in the Bay Area during which he attended graduate school at U.C. Berkeley and worked as a sous chef in a floating French restaurant")
(b) The article is locked behind paywall.
(c) There is no need to read the rest. Part of the article talks about 5G, which I do not quote understand and, anyway, am not impressed.