Vikas Rambal’s $6.5bn fertiliser plant: how one call turned dreams into reality
Vikas Rambal’s first business ended in legendary acrimony, the second faltered and his third was shelved as a fantasy. Now worth $4.8bn, this is a story of keeping the dream alive.
Sometimes it takes just a simple phone call to put grand plans back on track. For Vikas Rambal, that call came in 2017, when Woodside Energy placed his ambition to build his own fertiliser plant back on the agenda.
That call eventually catapulted Rambal from being one of Australia’s very wealthy to elite billionaire status – and to becoming one of very few Australians to derive the core of his family’s wealth from manufacturing, rather than digging up and shipping out raw resources.
Rambal is now only a few years away from the start of production at one of the biggest manufacturing plants ever built in Australia, a giant $6.5bn fertiliser factory on the culturally and environmentally sensitive Burrup Peninsula in Western Australia’s far north-west.
With US private equity giant Global Infrastructure Partners, Rambal’s Perdaman Industries has raised debt and $2.1bn equity needed to build the giant urea plant, which he says is now close to half-finished. It is due to ramp up to full production in 2027.
But it has been a long journey, even by his own admission. Perdaman’s Burrup plant is Rambal’s third time around in Australia’s manufacturing industry.
The first, with Indian businessman Pankaj Oswal, descended into levels of acrimony that are still the stuff of legend in Australia’s business fraternity, but still delivered the core of Rambal’s wealth. The second foundered after one of WA’s only two coal miners went bust.
And even the third attempt, now closing in on success, has seen several near-death experiences.
“A lot of people will not do a second project, I cannot debate why I did it. Maybe I’m crazy, maybe I have odd thought processes,” Rambal tells The List. “Sometimes I pinch myself that I did it, and every day I get up in the morning and ask that question.
“And to be honest, Australia is not a very easy place to do manufacturing.”
But Rambal, who debuts on The List: Richest 250 this year with an estimated $4.8bn fortune, only came to Australia to do business, he says.
He also reportedly had a boyhood obsession with Holden cars, though he moved to WA in 2000 after working at Bharat Petroleum which was formerly Shell back in India, because a corporate contact told him there could be business opportunities in Australia’s west.
A chemical engineer by training, Rambal identified that WA’s rich supplies of gas – allied with Indian engineering know-how – was the ideal combination for a massive ammonia plant. It took seven years to build on the Burrup, and it remains one of the biggest manufacturing facilities ever completed in the country. It is next door to his current project.
He built the ammonia plant with financial support from Oswal, a scion of one of India’s richest families. Oswal is now best known in Perth for his family’s flamboyant lifestyle, and for the acrimonious lead-up to his departure from Australia. That included a sprawling suite of lawsuits, including an attempt by Rambal to push their joint company into receivership, a successful attempt to wrest control of the plant by ANZ Bank, and a massive tax fight with the ATO.
The circus surrounding the Oswals has overshadowed the success of the plant, Rambal says. Now run by Norway’s Yara International, the Burrup ammonia plant had its teething troubles, but remains one of the few major downstream manufacturing facilities successfully built in Australia this century.
“If we remove the saga of the fight between the shareholders, that project has been running for 22 years now. And that’s my design. It was my testimony. I pride myself on it, and I say to everyone that that is my daughter,” Rambal says.
After settling his dispute with Oswal in 2007, Rambal then turned to an effort to create a new urea plant in WA’s southwest, cutting a deal with Rick Stowe’s Griffin Coal to feed the plant. Griffin went bust in 2009 and the mine’s buyer, India’s Lanco International, reneged on a 2011 deal, before itself collapsing four years later.
And even though Rambal had already turned his attention back to an alternative site on the Burrup, by 2013 there was not enough free gas in WA to feed the proposed plant at a reasonable price.
So how do you keep a dream alive when the world seems set against your success?
Rambal attributes it to patience, hard work and a conservative investment policy – no speculative mining stocks at all, he says with a laugh.
Rambal reportedly walked away from his settlement with Oswal with about $200m. He adopted a “typical family office” investment structure to put the money to work.
“I went for the cashflow decisions. So we have about 20 per cent for the development of projects, 50 per cent on assets which are giving cashflow, and acquiring businesses about 10 per cent, and 10 per cent for reserves,” he says.
The 2025 edition of The List – Australia’s Richest 250 is published on Friday in The Australian and online at www.richest250.com.au
Some of that cash was pumped into a pharmaceutical manufacturing business in India (where Rambal was photographed by The List on a recent trip), an electrical and communications business, and the bulk going to build an extensive property portfolio. Risk money was reserved for ongoing planning for the fertiliser plant, and diversification into renewable energy.
But for years, after the failure of the Lanco deal, the fertiliser plant was parked.
“I just switched off. I said to myself that maybe this country is not ready, because gas prices were north of $10 (a gigajoule),” he says.
“All my intellectual property was protected, stored.”
It wasn’t until a phone call from Woodside in 2017 that Rambal’s plans got back on track. By then, the engineer was looking elsewhere for manufacturing opportunities.
Not only was gas available, and cheap, but newly-elected state Labor Premier Mark McGowan had won an election on a promise to help diversify the WA economy beyond merely exporting raw materials.
The gas deal was the key to reviving Perdaman’s plans. Without a guaranteed supply contract, which he now has for 25 years from Woodside, nothing else was possible.
Rambal still credits then-Woodside boss Peter Coleman – alongside his successor, Meg O’Neill – for their commitment to helping make sure a deal could be done.
“Credit it to him. Some people come into the world to be nation-building guys. He’s one of those; he has the dream. And then Meg followed, she supported me a lot,” he says.
But even then, Rambal’s plans nearly came a cropper. The global financial crisis in 2008 and the commodities boom from 2010 played their role in bringing his earlier plans undone. The Covid-19 pandemic almost did the same in 2020.
Negotiations over funding stalled, the global post-pandemic reconstruction boom pushed project costs up and his major construction partner, WA engineering contractor Clough, went into administration.
“Everything that could go wrong, went wrong. Covid-19 increased the cost by 20 to 30 per cent, so we had to raise more money. Then we have to change a bit of the gas contract. Then the contractor went belly-up, as their balance sheet was hit hard,” Rambal says.
But with the dream alive, he didn’t stop working through the problems until they were all solved, at the same time as overseeing the rest of Perdaman’s businesses and family investments.
“My average days, I’m not exaggerating, were 12 to 13 hours long. Because once you diversify your business, you have operations in India, your back office, and then you have institutions, you have our own property portfolio, and you have our own household,” he says.
“Then you have this big project you are doing. It takes life out of you, because you can’t discard them. You can’t do that, you’re committed to that.”
It wasn’t until 2023, six years after Woodside again floated the prospect of a gas deal on the Burrup, that Perdaman finally closed its debt and equity package for the Burrup plant.
When complete, the plant will produce 2.3 million tonnes of fertiliser, and another 1.2 million tonnes of ammonia as a by-product.
“I still believe Australia should be a hub of manufacturing. Australia should be treated as a supplier of good finished products, because we have land mass, we have water, we have gas, we have renewable energy,” he says.
“We think by constructing this large industry, we have done our job. The mission I had in 2000 is fulfilled.”
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