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This was published 8 months ago
Elon Musk will soon face a rival tech entrepreneur building fast electric cars, but Aussie rich lister David Dicker is on a very different track to the world’s wealthiest man.
For starters, Dicker started with more humble origins as a roof installer with his dad’s business in Sydney.
David Dicker is out to build a car that puts Formula 1 top speeds to shame.Credit:Dean Mackenzie
He is also still waiting on the purchase of his first private jet – a used Bombardier Global XRS to be exact. As with many things since 2020, the pandemic has gotten in the way.
“I haven’t actually got the jet because unfortunately, the private jet market’s been completely upended by this COVID thing. And it’s proven very difficult to actually find something,” he says.
Dicker made his start in computers back in the 1970s after coming across his first microcomputer while working with his dad’s building business in Sydney.
His business, IT and computer reseller Dicker Data, has a similar no frills feel to it. Which is what you would expect from a low margin, brutally efficient, business that bears little resemblance to the current crop of Aussie tech darlings taking the market by storm.
Except for one thing: Its share price performance.
Investors watched the stock rise more than 500 per cent in less than three years and put its executive chairman on the rich list.
There is no secret to it, according to Dicker. He pays his executives more than anyone else in the sector to reward good performance, and he also implements strict financial metrics on how it all operates.
“We only have a few sort-of rigid metrics in our company. They are mainly around sales, profit percentage and the inventory, but we just don’t allow a deviation from those.”
His generosity with staff pay has paid off. Dicker’s shares gave him a personal wealth of one billion dollars when it hit a record high of $16.60 last year.
It quickly plunged when he sold $40 million worth of shares to pursue hobbies like his racing car interests and his pursuit of a jet to get him between his homes in Dubai, New Zealand and business in Sydney. It obviously triggered concerns he was stepping away from the business despite owning more than one-third of its shares after the sale.
“This sale seems to have provoked a loss of confidence in Dicker Data which is entirely unwarranted. It seems that people have read things into this sale that are just not there. This sale does not mean, in any way, that I am reducing my role or involvement with Dicker Data,” he said in a statement to the ASX following the 20 per cent plunge.
It’s not an issue for Dicker fans who cite the executive teams’ skin in the game as one of the reasons they like the stock so much.
“A testament to their conviction in the long-term success of the business is that the KMPs (key management persons) have not been issued shares or options and have built their equity stakes by buying shares on market,” Totus Capital’s Tim Warner told LiveWire earlier this year.
David Dicker’s Rodin FZed has close to F1-style performance.
For Dicker, the sale was partly about enjoying his wealth, but it was also about making the most of his various pursuits and minimising the time taken.
“The main thing is time. At my age that gets more and more important,” says the 68 year older Dicker.
Using commercial flights means attending a board meeting in Sydney could consume up to three days of his time. Setting your own flight schedule can mean doing it in one. It keeps him away from Australia which he has previously referred to as an “authoritarian shithole.”
And Dicker has a lot to catch up on when his years of isolation in New Zealand end this year. His lack of residency or Kiwi passport means he has been stuck there for most of the pandemic, and he has not been to his other home in Dubai since March 2020, and has missed many meetings on the Ferrari Challenge race circuit around the region.
“Trying to pick stocks is a mug’s game, if you asked me.”
“I’ve lost two and a half years of Ferrari Challenge. And at my age, that’s a real bummer,” he says.
But Dicker has an important project to oversee in New Zealand, of course: Rodin Cars, his passion project which started with plans to build and sell track cars (which cannot be driven on public roads) capable of Formula 1 speeds. It came with a price tag to match at around $1 million.
The Australian Financial Review’s motoring writer Tony Davis described the task as: “Building, and making commercially available, a track car faster than any in Formula One, and then making a road version of the same one-seat, fighter plane on wheels concept.”
It might not have gone to plan, but Dicker has set a new course for the business which would inspire some envy from Musk. He is aiming to build the fastest road car in the world, and electric cars will be part of his plan, of course.
“We’re building a full electric race car. We’ll have it running next year, and we feel very confident that we’re going to have success with it,” he says.
“The electric cars tend to be a bit weaker at the top speed level, but the top speed isn’t really relevant to the road.”
He admits that selling super cars that can’t be driven on a public road was a harder sell than expected.
“I probably didn’t really quite understand how limited the track car market was, to be honest, I didn’t realise that it would have started with the road car.”
While Dicker thinks Tesla’s valuations are unsustainable, even now, he is not ruling out listing his car business when it gets into production.
“We’d probably be very interested in listing our company. Why wouldn’t you do it? I’ve done it before it worked out pretty well.”
The other project that saw Dicker liquidate a small portion of his Dicker Data investment is his share investments.
To quote the ASX release, he planned to return to trading the US sharemarket, something he first did in 1997 which gave him a close up view of the dotcom boom.
But this time, it’s different for Dicker. He is leaning towards index funds rather than picking winners.
“Trying to pick stocks is a mug’s game, if you asked me,” he says and points out that most people who do it, don’t make money.
“Most people just don’t have the stomach for that stuff. If you want to trade the market successfully, the less you care about money the better you’re going to do. If you care, it’s going to eat you alive.”
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