GREEN, PHILIP

GREEN, PHILIP (1952– ), British businessman. Born in London, the son of a property investor who died when he was 12, Green left school at 16 and worked for a shoe importer before starting a company which imported jeans from the Far East. Over a period of 20 years, starting in the mid-1980s, he built up one of greatest of contemporary British retailing fortunes. In the late 1990s he bought British Home Stores (BHS), a High Street retailing fixture with hundreds of branches, vastly increasing its profitability by a combination of hands-on direct management of all phases of BHS's operations and such counterintuitive means as not advertising. Green expanded his retailing empire to include such retailing giants as Arcadia, Top Shop, and Dorothy Perkins, although bids by him to purchase Safeway (2003) and Marks & Spencer (2005) were not successful. Green, who has lived in Monaco in recent years, was ranked in 2005 as Britain's fifth wealthiest man, worth £4.85 billion,. (William D. Rubinstein (2nd ed.)