(Bloomberg) — James K. Irving, the Canadian billionaire who expanded his family’s forest products business into a conglomerate and founded a record tree-planting program, has died. He was 96.
Irving died in Saint John, New Brunswick, his family announced on Friday. He is survived by four children, Jim, Robert, Mary-Jean and Judith, 14 grandchildren and 13 great-grandchildren.
His younger brother, billionaire oilman Arthur L. Irving, died just last month at the age of 93. The youngest of the three siblings, John Irving, died in 2010.
Irving’s estimated net worth was $7.2 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. He was the chairman of J.D. Irving Ltd., the closely held conglomerate started in 1882 by his grandfather James Dergavel Irving. Today it employs some 19,000 people across forestry, energy, transportation, frozen food and shipbuilding in Atlantic Canada, according to its website.
Known for the sawmills and paper plants that survived when rivals closed, Irving invested in technology and expanded into more valuable products. As newspapers and newsprint started to decline, Irving shifted the business to bathroom tissues and diapers. The company is a private-label supplier and also sells under the Royale brand in Canada and as Scotties in the US.
The Irving family is the sixth-biggest landowner in the US, with almost 1.3 million acres, according to The Land Report, a magazine on American land ownership.
(Updates with details. A previous version removed an incorrect photo and corrected the company’s name in a deck heading.)
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