Ackman Sees Expansion of Activist Investing to Europe

LONDON â€" The investor William A. Ackman said on Tuesday that he believeds activist investing by shareholders would be an increasing trend in Europe in the coming years.

Speaking at the University of Oxford’s Said Business School, Mr. Ackman, the chief executive of the hedge fund Pershing Square Capital, said that shareholder activism in Europe is about a decade behind where it is in the United States.

“I think it’s going to happen,” Mr. Ackman said. The demand for returns by pensioners in Britain and the rest of Europe “will drive shareholder-run activism.”

Mr. Ackman, who has recently started a fund that looks for global opportunities for investment, said he had mostly focused on the United States because of its familiarity but also because boards of directors are more open to listening to concerns raised by activist investors.

The Pershing Square Foundation, a charitable organization founded by Mr. Ackman and his wife, pays for scholarships at Oxford’s business school. He was the featured speaker at an event there on Tuesday night.

Mr. Ackman touched on a variety of topics on Tuesday, ranging from his unsuccessful bid to change the culture at J.C. Penney by bringing in a new chief executive to his ongoing public spat with the investor Carl C. Ichan about Herbalife.

On J.C. Penney, an investment where he said his firm lost $500 million, Mr. Ackman said he believed his thesis on turning around the company was “right.”

J.C. Penney was a faded brand that needed an update and had valuable real estate in some of the top retail locations in the country, Mr. Ackman said. He was also able to attract a well-respected retail veteran, Ron Johnson, as the new chief executive and to tie his compensation to the future growth of the business.

But Mr. Ackman said he found himself in a situation where he didn’t have the majority support of the board, as he did with his successful investment in Canadian Pacific Railway. So it became increasingly difficult to continue with the same strategy when results soured at the retailer.

Mr. Johnson, a veteran of Target and Apple, was forced out 15 months after taking the job, in part because his plan to eliminate what he felt was unnecessary discounting by the retailer drove away many of the retailer’s traditional customers. The company went from steady profits to posting large losses.

“I don’t think I’ll go on a board and have one of 11 seats,” Mr. Ackman said.

Mr. Ackman also said J.C. Penney could have benefited from testing its new concept of pricing, instead of rolling it out nationwide at once. At Apple, Mr. Johnson’s former company, testing wasn’t considered a crucial concept by its founder, Steve Jobs, Mr. Ackman said.

Separately, Mr. Ackman, who is never shy about sharing his opinion, said he continued to believe that Herbalife is the equivalent of a “pyramid scheme” that is driven primarily by costly sales of startup inventories of products to low-level sales people, rather than public interest in its nutritional supplement products, which he says are a commodity.

Mr. Ichan and Mr. Ackman have fought a very public battle in recent months over the supplement seller, including a back-and-forth on television in which Mr. Ichan called Mr. Ackman a “crybaby.” Mr. Ackman recently moved to cap the potential losses in his bet against the company.

Mr. Ackman’s prediction on Tuesday: “This business will be shut down, this business will collapse” within the next 12 months.

An Hebalife spokesman had no immediate comment.