Irving controls JD Irving, a closely held company that owns Canadian shipyards, potato processors, paper product makers and home improvement stores, and more than three million acres of timberland in Maine and eastern Canada. In 2008, he and two brothers split a $3 billion trust and the conglomerate their father founded.
JK Irving's net worth of $5.69B can buy ...
... and is equivalent to ...
Irving's fortune is derived from his ownership of JD Irving, a conglomerate based in Saint John, New Brunswick. He's the sole owner of the business, which was part of a company founded by his father, K.C. Irving.
Irving owns 3.2 million acres of timberland in Maine, New Brunswick and Nova Scotia. It's valued at $400 an acre. Prices are from Jack Lutz, president of Forest Research Group, in Hermon, Maine. Irving also leases 2.6 million acres of provincial New Brunswick land. It's valued at $400 an acre and discounted 25 percent, discounts seen in leased land transactions in the U.S. south, said Lutz. Subleased land isn't valued.
Irving shipbuilding was awarded a $25 billion federal contract in 2011 to supply Canada's navy. The contract should run for 20 to 30 years but isn't guaranteed, according to the office of the National Procurement Strategy in 2014. The business is valued at 0.5 times its projected annual revenue of $1 billion, which is based on a 25-year supply contract the company signed with the Canadian government in 2011.
Irving owns Kent Supply Centers, a home-improvement chain with 50 locations. Its valuation is based on company disclosed location sizes, peer sales per square foot and peer average enterprise value-to-Ebitda.
Irving's sawmills, consumer paper products and potato processing businesses are valued based on data disclosed by Irving, regulators and/or competitors. A series of other businesses are aggregated here because their valuation is based on data that isn't updated on a regular basis.
Irving also has one-third of a $3 billion trust left by his father, according to a 2012 Bermuda Supreme Court opinion.
Media representatives for JD Irving didn't respond to phone calls and e-mails seeking comment.
James K. Irving was born in New Brunswick, Canada. His father, Kenneth Colin Irving, founded the Irving Co., a collection of oil, timber, consumer products and ship-building assets valued at more than $10 billion at his death in 1992. The company was split into three and is owned by his descendants.
K.C. Irving started the family business with a Ford dealership in Saint John, New Brunswick, in 1925, later expanding into gas stations and paper production. James and two his brothers, Arthur and Jack, grew up in the port city of Saint John, attended boarding schools in eastern Canada and, later, Acadia University, where all three dropped out to work in the family business, according to an interview with John DeMont, a Nova Scotia-based writer who worked for Arthur Irving and wrote a biography of the family, "Citizen Irving: K.C. Irving and His Legacy."
As a young man, JK preferred the family business to school, leaving Acadia University within a week to manage logging on family lands in northern New Brunswick, according to DeMont. The three branches of the Irving family split the company into three in 2008, with James getting ownership off the paper-focused division he had operated since leaving college.
While the Irvings' imprint on their home city of Saint John is strong, the family lets out little information about its activities, to the point of being obsessed with secrecy, according to DeMont. During K.C.'s life, the Irvings once hired a writer to produce an official biography of the family, then refused to cooperate when the writer requested a list of the family companies, DeMont wrote in his book.
JK's sons Jim and Robert attended prep school in Bath, Maine, while his daughters Judith and Mary Jeane went to prep school in Stony Brook, New York. The oldest of his children, Jim, runs the forestry products arm of JD Irving today.
JK and his wife, Jean, live in Rothesay, New Brunswick.