LOIDA NICOLAS-LEWIS

Businesswoman, philanthropist, civic leader, motivational speaker, author and lawyer

 

Born 1942 (age 71–72)
Sorsogon City, Sorsogon, Philippines

 

Loida Nicolas-Lewis is a Filipino-born American businesswoman, who is the widow of TLC Beatrice International Holdings Inc. founder, first chairman and CEO, the African-American Wall Street financier Reginald F. Lewis. TLC Beatrice, a $2 billion multinational food company that did all of its business overseas, was widely known as the US's largest black-owned business.

 

Business interests

 

After the death of her husband Reginald from brain cancer in 1993, Loida assumed the leadership of the business. She became the Chair and CEO of TLC Beatrice from 1994 to 2000. She had some success in the company’s growth, achieving a 35% return to investors at the time she liquidated the business in the year 2000. The company’s major investments and operations were spread across Europe. In Asia, TLC Beatrice China operated retail convenience stores in four major cities in China and TLC Beatrice Foods Philippines operated a meat processing plant in Naga City.

 

In the Philippines she established the family-run Lewis College in Sorsogon. She also funded part of a micro finance project in Sorsogon called PALFSI (People’s Alternative Livelihood Foundation of Sorsogon, Inc.) and chairs the Business for Integrity and Stability of our Nation Foundation, Inc. (Bisyon 2020).

 

In July 2012, China’s state-controlled media hit Lewis and called on the Chinese people to boycott a chain of “Beatrice” convenience stores in four Chinese cities (Xiamen, Chengdu, Suzhou and Guangzhou) after she held a press conference in Manila earlier and announced a worldwide campaign to “Boycott Made in China Products”, as a way of matching China’s diplomatic and military arrogance in claiming ownership of the Scarborough Shoal and the Kalayaan Group of Islands in the West Philippine Sea. Fortunately she had already sold her ownership interest in the “Beatrice” stores – at a substantial discount – several years ago to former Chinese business partners. Hence Chinese authorities were urging a boycott of Chinese wholly-owned businesses.

 

Earlier that year, in May, Lewis led about 75 Filipino-Americans and US Pinoys for Good Governance (USP4GG) who marched to the Chinese Consulate on 42nd Street and 12th Avenue to protest Chinese incursions into Philippine territory. She chairs the New York-based USP4GG.

 

Legal work

 

Lewis earned a law degree from the University of the Philippines College of Law in 1960, and was admitted to the Philippine Bar in 1968.

She is the first Asian American to pass the American Bar (in 1974) without having been educated in the United States.

She worked for the Law Students Civil Right Research Council in New York in 1969, Manhattan Legal Services from 1970-3, and as an attorney for the Immigration and Naturalization Services from 1979-90.

Early life

Born and raised in Sorsogon City, Philippines. She attended St. Agnes Academy (formerly Academia de Sta. Ines), and graduated cum laude from St. Theresa's College, a private, Roman Catholic women's college in Manila, Philippines (that location has since closed).

 

Personal life

 

Loida Nicolas-Lewis met her husband-to-be Reginald F. Lewis on a blind date in New York in 1968, and married on 16 August 1969 in Manila.

 

Reginald Lewis acquired Beatrice International in December 1987 in a $985 million leveraged buyout, creating the largest African American-owned company in the United States.

 

The family moved to Paris in 1990. Loida Nicolas-Lewis has spoken to audiences around the United States and the world to promote the biography of her late husband, “Why Should White Guys Have All the Fun?: How Reginald Lewis Created a Billion Dollar Business Empire.”

 

She currently resides in New York City.

 

References

 

1.       ^http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loida_Nicolas-Lewis

2.       ^http://www.aboutmyrecovery.com/loida-nicolas-lewis-talks-on-grief

3.       ^http://globalnation.inquirer.net/36639/loida-lewis-to-china

4.       ^http://globalnation.inquirer.net/44732/loida-lewis-is-chinas-newest-public-enemy-no-1