Common Sense Paved the Road To Success
- Wits University
Dr Emmanuel Clive Pohl AM is one of Wits’ most successful graduates, who ascribes his academic years at Wits and the notable success in his career to good common sense.
He grew up in Blyvooruitzicht, a small gold mining town outside of Johannesburg, where his father was an underground manager. After attending Rocklands Primary School, a school on the mine, he attended King Edward VII School in Johannesburg, where he excelled at sports and academics, in particular, math and science and where he developed an interest in electrical engineering and decided to pursue it at university.
Pohl graduated with a BSc in Electrical Engineering at Wits University in 1975, followed by an MBA from the Wits Business School in 1977. During his years at Wits, where he played cricket, soccer and rugby, he had a full university life and made some lifelong friends.
After his years at Wits, he worked first as an electrical engineer with Sappi, a subsidiary of Union Corp Limited. His next job was working for a British cement company, Blue Circle, in its Management Services Division where he was tasked with market research and marketing, which proved to be his introduction into the world of finance.
He left Blue Circle rather abruptly after successfully negotiating a long-term contract for the company to manufacture and supply a single model of a large transformer for Eskom. When he received a signed letter of intent for the contract, he sent it to the Chairman, expecting to be praised for his initiative. Instead, he was reprimanded at the next board meeting for overreaching his authority. He immediately wrote a note of resignation on the back of the board minutes, passed it to the chairman and walked out of the meeting.
He then started one of the few consulting engineering firms at the time, EC Pohl Ltd., which designed low-cost electrical systems for black housing areas. His work on these systems formed the basis for his doctoral thesis: Cost effectiveness and subsequent design optimisation for black household electrification projects in the RSA, which he completed in little more than a year. In 1985, North-West University awarded him a Doctorate in Business Administration (Economics).
After four years of running his own company, he decided to switch careers and went into stockbroking, initially working for Ed Hern Rudolph at the Johannesburg Stock Exchange as an energy analyst focusing on the coal, diamonds, chemicals, paper and packaging sectors of the exchange.
He did well there and four years later was headhunted by South Africa’s largest and most prestigious brokerage firm, Davis Borkum Hare. In his recent autobiography, written with his wife Gail, Pohl describes his time there working alongside the legendary Max Borkum, as “the cornerstone of his career’.
Despite his meteoric success at the firm, Manny and his wife, Gail were concerned with the prevailing uncertain political and economic climate in South Africa and decided to emigrate to Australia in 1994 where they settled on the Gold Coast. Manny already had an Australian passport as his father had been born there.
Financially, he sacrificed much to make the move as Davis Borkum Hare was negotiating to sell the business to Merryl Lynch.
After spending more than a year as a Private Portfolio Manager with Westpac Investment Management Limited in Brisbane, Pohl was offered a job with Wilson HTM Ltd thanks to a recommendation by Christopher Palmer-Tomkinson of Cazenove, with whom he had worked closely while at Davis Borkum Hare.
In 1996, Pohl was appointed managing director at Wilson HTM Asset Management, which was soon rebranded as Hyperion Asset Management, with the executives of the company acquiring a 50% stake. As CEO, Managing Director, and Chairman, Pohl grew the company to over $3 billion in funds under management.
In 2012, Manny Pohl sold his stake in Hyperion and together with his son Jared, founded his own company, EC Pohl & Co. As Executive Chairman of the group he also served as executive and chief investment officer of its subsidiary, ECP Asset Management. He has been ranked among the top four fund managers over the past decade. In 2020, ECP Asset Management performed the best of the reviewed mid-caps with a 46,4% growth. His youngest son, Jason, also joined the firm after being admitted to the Supreme Court of New South Wales.
He fervently believes that “it is better to sleep well than to eat well”. In a 2022 interview with Forbes, he said: “There have been times in my life when we could have made a lot of money but it was like skating on thin ice.”
“In this Industry, the only thing that you have is your reputation. You lose that, and wherever you are, it’s very hard to come back from it”.
Pohl and his wife are keen philanthropists and support causes that are not necessarily popular. Their Foundation is supported by donating 5% of EC Pohl & Co’s annual after-tax profit. He and his family have a deep love for South Africa and visit whenever they can and support various philanthropic initiatives here.
In 2019, Pohl was awarded a Member of the Order of Australia medal in the 2019 Queen's Birthday Honours List for "significant service to the finance sector, and to the community” and was named as the winner in the Most Outstanding Professional category by SAICA at their 2024 annual South African in Australia Awards.
Peter Bezuidenhoudt, Dr Manny Pohl AM, Professor Zeblon Vilakazi FRS during a recent Wits Campus visit