Enlightenment Publishing has announced the publication of ‘Sir Ian Wood – Aberdeen’s Billionaire – Ruthlessly Humble’ by author Raymond Smith
The Aberdeen publisher called Sir Ian Wood the last great Industrialist of our age, with the biography telling the story for the first time of “the most Important Business figure in Scottish History, Scotland’s richest and most reclusive homegrown billionaire, Sir Ian Wood, Including his tragedies, the man, and how he transitioned his company “Woodgroup” from fishing into an International energy giant, employing 60,000. “
With a personal fortune of £2.2bn, Wood is the only home grown Billionaire founder of his company living in Scotland.
To this day, he is one of only 5 families who retain 80% of all fishing rights in Scotland’s waters, and at 84 still runs his fishing company John Wood Holdings.
His company holds the British all time record for double digit company growth, missing 10%+ year on year growth only twice in 40 years, and was the first Scottish company in history to see gross profits in excess of $1bn each year for 10 consecutive years from 2006 to 2016.
Writing in the book’s forward, Sir Tom Hunter commented:
“Sir Ian’s story is the stuff of legend – he took a parochial fishing business and transformed it into a global oil & gas services business and in passing became one of the few Scottish billionaires. Not content with his
entrepreneurial success and treading in the footsteps of Andrew Carnegie, Sir Ian set about applying his inimitable business skills to the world of philanthropy working both at home in education and economic
development and in Sub-Saharan Africa utilising a venture philanthropy model. This is the story of one of the greatest Scottish businessmen and philanthropists of all time.”
