Westfield Corporation

Westfield Corporation

Westfield Corporation was founded in 1959 by Frank Lowy and John Saunders in Blacktown, a western suburb of Sydney. Lowy, a Hungarian-born Holocaust survivor, grew the company from a single shopping center into a global mall developer. The firm conducted its initial public offering on the Australian Securities Exchange in 1960 (per ASX public records). Westfield's strategy has centered on owning and operating large, enclosed shopping centers anchored by department stores and major retailers. The portfolio expanded across Australia through the 1960s–1980s, and then into the United States beginning in 1977, with malls in Connecticut and California. By the 2000s, Westfield had become a top-ten owner of US shopping centers by gross leasable area, with properties in states such as New York, New Jersey, Illinois, and California. Key assets have included Westfield Garden State Plaza in Paramus, New Jersey, and Westfield Montgomery in Bethesda, Maryland. The firm also developed Westfield London, a major urban retail complex in the UK. In 2014, Westfield restructured into two entities: Scentre Group, which owned the Australian and New Zealand portfolio, and Westfield Corporation, which held the US and UK malls. Westfield Corporation was acquired by Unibail-Rodamco in 2018 for approximately $24.7 billion (per Reuters, 2018). Post-acquisition, the Westfield brand remains on many malls, and the Lowy family has continued to operate through private investment vehicles. Westfield's structural differentiator was its pioneering model of developing large-scale, super-regional shopping destinations with department store anchors, often in partnership with institutional capital partners for design and development. The firm's governance featured heavy family involvement across two generations before the sale to Unibail-Rodamco.