Onex Corp.

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Onex Corporation TSX: OCX is a Toronto based investment firm. It was founded in 1983 by Gerry Schwartz. Today it is a public traded company but Schwartz has 67.6% of the voting control and continues to serve as Chairman and CEO.

Counting all its assets, Onex is the largest employer in Canada, with 138,000 employees. It should be noted however that the firm's strategy is to regularly "realize" the gain on its investments and thereby the "effective headcount" figure is quite misleading. Although the firm has majority control over most of its subsidiaries, rarely does it have whole ownership.

[The firm specializes in buying firms in Canada and the United States that are under valued or in need of restructuring and then later selling them at a significant profit. These restructuring efforts often involve cutting wages and workforces and outsourcing work to lower wage countries abroad.]

The firm is involved is a wide array of industries. Among its specialties is buying the high cost manufacturing arms of companies and turning them into low cost suppliers. In the 1980s it played this role in the auto parts industry, in 1996 it bought IBM's manufacturing division Celestica, and in 2004 bought Boeing's Kansas and Oklahoma manufacturing facilities. The firm has also long been interested in the airline industry and is well known for its failed 1999 attempt to buy both Air Canada and Canadian Airlines to merge them. Onex is involved in the American health care industry, owning a number of firms, the movie theatre business (Cineplex Entertainment), and in aerospace, through its ownership of Spirit AeroSystems.

Its head office is on the 49th floor of BCE Place in Toronto and it also has an office in New York.