For south Wales, Sir Terry Matthews is the archetypal local boy done good. He was born in 1943 at the Lydia Beynon maternity hospital – now on the site of Matthews’ Celtic Manor resort, which hosted the Ryder Cup in 2010 and a Nato summit four years later.
Matthews will always be the man who brought the Ryder Cup to Wales. He invested more than £150m to transform the site into one of the leading golf venues in Europe.
When Celtic Manor hosted the biennial golf match between Europe and the US, it did not initially go to plan. Heavy rain in Wales disrupted proceedings, forcing the match to go into an unprecedented fourth day.
However, a dramatic final day, when the Northern Irish golfer Graeme McDowell holed a late putt to win the cup for Europe, meant Matthews had no regrets.
“I had business colleagues from Canada and the United States and all over the world ringing me up to say how sorry they were about the weather,” Matthews later recalled.
“I said: ‘Are you kidding me? We got an extra day of global coverage for all the sponsors. Can you imagine signing up for an event as big as the Ryder Cup and getting 33% extra for free.’”
Matthews is worth £1.04bn according to the Sunday Times Rich List, making him the third-richest person in Wales and the 101st-richest in the UK.
He made his fortune primarily through technology and telecoms. He has founded or funded more than 100 companies, making millions of pounds along the way by building them up and then selling them on. They include Mitel, which he sold to BT in the 1980s, and Newbridge Networks, which was bought by the French company Alcatel.
Matthews trained as an apprentice at the Post Office research department in north London, which developed electronics and computers. He accepted a job offer to join Microsystems International in Canada, which has been his base ever since.
Despite living in Canada, Matthews has regularly championed causes in south Wales, meaning his involvement in talks to rescue Port Talbot and Tata Steel UK is no surprise.
The billionaire is chairman of the Swansea Bay City Region board, a partnership between local authorities and local business. In recent months Matthews has talked up the prospects of the controversial Swansea Bay tidal lagoon project and criticised the government for delays to the electrification of the rail line between Cardiff and Swansea.
Matthews is therefore a powerful backer for the proposed management buyout of Tata Steel’s UK business. Even if he decides not to put his own money into saving the steelworks, the businessman, who was knighted in 2001, has an enviable contact book of financiers on both sides of the Atlantic that could prove useful for Port Talbot.
