For someone who shuns the spotlight, chemicals billionaire Jim Ratcliffe has been in the news rather a lot lately. Crowned Britain’s richest person by the Sunday Times in May, knighted by the Queen in June, he’s now poised to quit the U.K. to live in Monaco, according to the Telegraph – sparking a fair bit of criticism given his support for Brexit.

This straight-talking runner, mountaineer and adventurer certainly likes to stay busy. He’s also developing a successor to the Land Rover Defender, a favorite of Britain’s moneyed rural classes, and merrily snapping up trophy assets such as the fashionable motorcycle jacket maker Belstaff, a Swiss football club and a safari park. There have been reports that he’d like to buy Chelsea Football Club from Roman Abramovich.

Ratcliffe, 65, can no doubt afford it. His globe-spanning chemicals empire Ineos Ltd. generated $6.6 billion of Ebitda in 2017 on sales of about $60 billion, thanks to buoyant demand and ruthless cost control. He’s worth about $14.5 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, based on his 60 percent or so equity interest in Ineos and a couple of mega-yachts. That’s maybe a conservative calculation.

He’s a complicated character, though, and his Anglo-Swiss company is pretty opaque. Still, if you're wondering what it takes to become Britain's richest person, here’s how he did it.

Don’t Worry About Being a Late Starter

Ratcliffe, who studied chemical engineering and worked later in venture capital, only started as an entrepreneur in 1992, aged 40, and founded Ineos just 20 years ago. It expanded quickly by buying unfashionable petrochemical assets cast off by big oil and chemicals groups. By slashing fixed costs, he soon had most of them generating lots of cash, allowing him to refinance loans. Ratcliffe’s trusted equity partners Andy Currie and John Reece each own almost one-fifth of Ineos.

Make Friends With Debt, But Don’t Fall In Love With It

One of Ratcliffe’s big talents is persuading banks to lend him vast amounts of money against Ineos’s assets to use for more deals. Most important was the $9 billion purchase of BP’s Innovene petrochemicals business in 2005, which made Ineos a big player in the industry. The financial crisis showed how risky that borrowing can be, though. Demand for chemicals crashed in 2008, Ineos tripped a debt covenant and its bonds crashed to about 10 cents on the dollar. Ineos lived to fight another day, but Ratcliffe still resents the extra fees he had to pay to lenders. He seems to have learned his lesson. Net debt at the core group was more than 7 billion euros ($8 billion) in 2009, or 7 times Ebitda according to Bloomberg data, but that fell to below 2 times at the end of last year. It’s been able to pay out about half a billion euros in dividends during the past two years. No wonder Ratcliffe’s been on a shopping spree.

Never Sell Equity and Definitely Don't Go Public

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