Cohen came from a poor immigrant family of eight, born in
Winnipeg, Manitoba as the son of Alexander and Rose (Diamond) Cohen, and he served with the
Royal Canadian Navy from 1942 to 1945. Albert's five brothers, John C. (Chauncey), Harry B. Cohen,
Morley Cohen, Samuel N. Cohen, and Joseph H. Cohen set up a small retail store and, by 1939, the family had scraped together enough monies to create
General Distributors Ltd., a wholesale import firm.
Sony and the Cohen Brothers By 1950, General Distributors sales amounted to $1 million. In 1952, the company obtained exclusive Canadian rights for
Paper Mate pens. Albert negotiated the sale of Papermate in Canada to the
Gillette (brand) Company of
Boston,
Massachusetts in 1955 whereby Gendis continued to distribute the Papermate pen in Canada until 1962 when Gillette fully took over. Then, in 1955, Cohen accomplished the feat of landing the Canadian distribution rights to
Sony products. Spotting an ad in a Japanese newspaper seeking a distributor for a new portable
transistor radio, Cohen met with Sony co-founder,
Akio Morita. On the basis of a handshake deal, Cohen cemented a partnership that would last for decades. The Cohen brothers scattered across Canada in order to manage the national business, each brother establishing himself in a major city: Morley (
Montreal), John (
Toronto), Joe (
Vancouver), Harry (
Calgary), and both Sam and Albert setting up headquarters (
Winnipeg). Gendis' stake in Sony of Canada was sold back to
Sony Corporation of
Tokyo,
Japan in 1995 for $207,000,000. This was a crowning achievement for Albert, the man who launched Sony's first national export business. In recognition of his forty-year association with Sony, Albert received the
Sony Lifetime Achievement Award in Tokyo in 2000.
SAAN, Metropolitan, real estate, and the Cohen Brothers The six brothers expanded into
real estate and
retailing. Over the years, they established several hundred
SAAN Stores as well as
Metropolitan and Greenberg junior department stores in all provinces of Canada. The explosive growth of the
SAAN Stores chain was guided by Samuel N. Cohen while Metropolitan's expansion was overseen by
Morley Cohen. By 1983, the company was a diversified Canadian conglomerate, renamed
Gendis. SAAN Stores was eventually sold in 2004 to a
Toronto based investor group and sold again in 2008 to
Genuity Capital, owner of
The Bargain! Shop discount chain. At one point, it is said the Cohen brothers owned downtown real estate in almost every major Canadian city. Albert began to accumulate real estate in downtown Winnipeg starting in the early 1960s and Gendis finally sold its city block of property to
Manitoba Hydro in 2003 for $16.2 million to allow for construction of the new Manitoba Hydro headquarters which officially opened in September 2009.
Oil & gas, and the Cohen Brothers Under Albert's guidance, the six brothers made several investments in the
petroleum industry. ==Gendis today==