There can be relatively few householders in the UK who have not bought a television, laptop, hi-fi, fridge or washing machine from one of the companies overseen by Stanley Kalms, Lord Kalms, who has died aged 93. Working up from a single north London camera shop to a chain of 1,300 branches of Curry’s, Dixons, PC World and The Link by the time he retired in 2002, Kalms bestrode the high streets and shopping malls of Britain with a portfolio that made him the largest electronics retailer in Europe with a fortune of £300m.
The white goods equipment, cameras and computers that Kalms sold interested him less than the act of selling: he could not use a computer and had difficulty operating a mobile phone. What mattered was the bottom line. “I get a buzz seeing people walking round my store and buying my products, walking up to a cash till and paying for them,” he told the Sunday Times in 2001. His stores, he would say, were really toy shops for men.
Kalms spent long hours in his Mayfair mews office in London, far away from the shop floor, but ventured forth every Friday to make a surprise swoop on a store to find out what they were doing wrong. He never found one that entirely satisfied him: “Each shop should be beautiful. It is where a retailer displays his arts, but I can usually find a hundred things wrong with it,” he told the Daily Mail. The screens around his office desk recorded what each shop was selling in real time, as well as the state of the stock market. “I have never read a single book on management,” he said in 2006. “I don’t need to study anyone else’s methodology. You have to have a passion for whatever you do and a rage to win.”
What lay beneath Kalms’s success was his competitiveness – “We have to be No 1, not No 2 or No 3” – and a willingness to undercut his rivals and copy them if necessary. He was also keen to keep up with innovations. “When I started to sell, the consumer was pleased to be able to buy, which is a very wrong thing. Now everyone will shop around on the internet. It’s the world we live in and we have to be No 1 on the internet,” he said. To that end, in 1998 he co-launched the Freeserve internet service provider for those who bought computers from his stores. It was sold to Wanadoo, owned by France Télécom, two years later for £1.65bn.
Kalms was born in London, into a family of 12 children who all became business people. His parents were both Jewish; his mother, Cissie, was of Polish origin, and his father, Charles, was of Russian heritage. During school holidays from Christ’s college, Finchley, Kalms worked at the photographic studio run by his easygoing father, which he had opened in Southend before moving to Hendon, north London. Stanley discovered that he enjoyed retailing more than studying, and at the shop he persuaded Charles that selling cameras and equipment would be more profitable than taking pictures. He doubled the business’s modest turnover, taking over its running. As the business expanded, eventually to 12 shops, the name Dixons was apparently chosen at random from a phone book.
Kalms’s key insight came during a trip to east Asia in 1958, when he saw a vast range of Japanese camera equipment being sold much more cheaply than in Britain. By securing direct import deals he was able to offer cameras at prices 30% lower than those on sale elsewhere. Dixons was floated on the Stock Exchange in 1962, making Kalms a millionaire at the age of 30. More deals followed, culminating in the £300m acquisition of Curry’s, with its 300 stores, after a bitter takeover battle in 1984.
In addition he took over the Silo electrical retailer in the US in 1987, but that venture proved to be a costly failure, and it was sold off at a loss six years later. An attempt to acquire Woolworth also ended in defeat, amid accusations that Dixons’ advisers had bugged the Woolworth boardroom.
Outside the business world, Kalms was active in Jewish affairs and with educational charities, including a foundation to support the study of Jewish culture and values, a chair for ethical studies in Jerusalem and a business ethics chair at the London Business School.
He was a governor of Dixons City academy in Bradford for 14 years and also chaired Jews’ College (now the London School of Jewish Studies), the religion’s principal theological establishment in the UK. In the 1980s he wrote a report for United (Orthodox) Synagogues calling for the body’s reorganisation, but his recommendations were not taken up. He also supported the appointment of Jonathan Sacks as chief rabbi in 1990, though he and Sacks later fell out after Kalms wrote a critical article in the Jewish Chronicle about Sacks’s leadership.
Kalms did tend to fall out with people. Initially a strong supporter of Margaret Thatcher and donor to the Conservative party, he became treasurer in 2001 for two years, serving under Iain Duncan Smith’s leadership until he was accused of not raising enough money for the party. He was subsequently made a life peer by Michael Howard, having earlier been knighted during John Major’s premiership.
But he was always a Eurosceptic and an opponent of the single currency, and grew increasingly critical of the Conservatives, especially under David Cameron. By 2009 he was saying he would consider voting for Ukip.
Kalms chaired Dixons Retail from 1971 until his retirement in 2002, and thereafter was group president until 2014, when it merged with Carphone Warehouse to create Dixons Carphone, which was renamed Currys in 2021. He was a director of the Centre for Policy Studies for 10 years (1991-2001) and of Business for Sterling (1998-2001).
In 1954 he married Pamela Jimack, who worked for Barnet health authority, having proposed to her within four days of their first meeting. They owned properties overlooking St James’s Park in central London, holiday homes in Israel and Portugal, and a yacht in Antibes in the south of France.
The couple had three sons, Richard, Stephen and Paul, all of whom worked only briefly for their father’s company before choosing alternative careers. Pamela, their children and eight grandchildren survive him.
• Harold Stanley Kalms, Lord Kalms, businessman, born 21 November 1931; died 30 March 2025
