Background and career
Richard Harold Smith (born 18 March 1944) is an Australian entrepreneur and aviator. He is the founder of Dick Smith Electronics, Australian Geographic and Dick Smith Foods. Smith has had a long interest in aviation and holds a number of world records in the field. A major philanthropist, he supports a number of charities and conservation efforts. Smith was Australian of the Year in 1986, and in 2015, he was awarded the Companion of the Order of Australia. He is a fellow of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry.
Smith's father was a salesman and sometime manager at Angus & Robertson's bookstore. He started a business that failed when Smith was 17. His mother was a housewife and his maternal grandfather pictorialist photographer Harold Cazneaux. As a child, he encountered serious academic difficulties, and having a speech defect, called himself "Dick Miff". From his home in East Roseville, Smith attended primary school at Roseville Public School at which, for the fifth grade, he ranked academically 45th in a class of 47. He attended North Sydney Technical High School. After three years of French, he managed only 7% in the Intermediate Certificate examination. He went on to complete his Leaving Certificate in 1961. He joined the 1st East Roseville Scout Group as a Wolf Cub in 1952, aged 8 and later as a Boy Scout and Rover until 1967, earning the Baden-Powell Award in 1966. Smith gained his amateur radio licence at the age of 16. He holds call sign VK2DIK. In his early 20s, Smith worked as a taxi radio repair technician for several years.
In 1968, with a A$610 investment by him and his then-fiancée Pip, Smith founded Dick Smith Car Radios, a small taxi radio repair business in the Sydney suburb of Neutral Bay, then later expanded into the car radio business at Gore Hill, naming himself the "Car-Radio 'Nut'". This business later became electronics retailer Dick Smith Electronics which grew rapidly in the late 1970s, particularly through sales of Citizens Band radios and then personal computers, with annual sales of about A$17 million by 1978. Smith took the business into Asia in 1978, opening a store in Ashley Road, Tsim Sha Tsui, Hong Kong's tourist shopping hub, and publishing an international catalogue edition until the store closed in 1980. In 1980, he sold the business to Woolworths for A$25 million. Though Smith retained no shares nor role in the company after 1982, the business continued to trade with his name prominently displayed in every aspect of its operations. Sales reached A$1.4 billion in 2014, before a sharp decline and closure of its then hundreds of stores in Australia and New Zealand by May 2016.
In 1986, Smith founded Australian Geographic Pty Ltd, which published the Australian Geographic magazine, a National Geographic-style magazine focusing on Australia. Smith did not want to greatly expand Australian Geographic, but his friend and CEO Ike Bain persuaded him to change his mind and soon it was a successful business. He sold the business to Fairfax Media in 1995 for A$41 million.
Smith co-produced the documentary First Contact, in 1983, recounting the discovery, in 1930, of a flourishing native population in the interior highlands of New Guinea. The film went on to win Best Feature Documentary at the 1983 Australian Film Institute Awards and was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature.
Smith founded Dick Smith Foods in 1999, a response to foreign ownership of Australian food producers, particularly Arnott's Biscuits, which in 1997 became a wholly owned subsidiary of the Campbell's. Dick Smith Foods only sold foods produced in Australia by Australian-owned companies and all profits went to charity. In 2018, Smith announced closure of the business in 2019, having distributed over A$10 million in profits to charity, citing aggressive competition from German-owned Aldi through a strategy including low-cost imports notwithstanding Aldi's claim to operate an Australian-first buying policy.
