Mining, boots and beef: Andrew Forrest’s $20bn portfolio

Andrew Forrest’s R.M. Williams deal captured plenty of attention, but he has about $20bn of other assets across a diverse range of sectors.

Potential buyers were told late last year that R.M. Williams’ earnings could treble by 2024 as it grows its business overseas. Picture: supplied by Andrew Forrest

Billionaire Andrew Forrest has made big headlines with his purchase of the iconic R.M. Williams brand, though it only accounts for about 1 per cent of his portfolio.

Forrest is best known for his Fortescue Metals Group, the iron ore business he has turned from a small concern into the so-called “third force” of Australian mining in less than two decades.

It has made him vastly wealthy, providing him with a fortune that allows him both to pour funds into one of the biggest charitable foundations in Australia and have a broad range of diversified investments.

R.M. Williams, that famous maker of boots, was purchased on the weekend by Forrest and wife Nicola’s private investment group Tattarang in a deal worth close to $200m.

“R.M. Williams is a quintessential Aussie brand with a long and proud history of high-quality Australian craftsmanship,” Forrest says. “To wear RMs is to wear the boots of the countless hardworking Australians that have come before us.”

There are also big expansion plans for R.M. Williams, which only has about 2 per cent of its revenue coming from outside Australia. For example, the British arm of the business only made an operating profit of about £100,000 from £4.8m revenue in 2019, accounts lodged in London with Companies House reveal.

Potential buyers were told late last year that R.M. Williams’ earnings could treble by 2024 as it grows its business overseas.

The roughly $200m Forrest paid for it was based on a business with earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortisation of $23m in 2019, and forecast to reach $34m next year and up to $83m by 2024.

But it is only one of dozens of investments Forrest has, underpinned by his stake he has in Fortescue worth more than $17bn that has paid him and his family more than $3.2bn in dividends in the past two years alone.

Fortescue shares on the ASX are up about 60 per cent since the start of 2020 as iron ore exports keep flowing out and record profits flow in. Such is the sheer value of Forrest’s 36 per cent stake, though, that a $3 fall in FMG’s share price in less than two months has caused a $3bn drop.

Yet money Forrest has made from mining has allowed him to pour hundreds of millions into his and Nicola’s Minderoo Foundation. The duo have donated more than $2bn to the foundation, one of the largest of its type in Australia, and will push towards the $3bn mark following their latest dividend payment of $1.16bn earlier this month.

Then there are the investments Forrest has via Tattarang, ranging from beef and boots to commercial property, cattle stations and apartment blocks, along with software, fintech and internet firms, and oyster operations.

It makes Forrest, who is among the three wealthiest people on The List — Australia’s Richest 250 now, one of the country’s most diversified individual investors.

One of his holdings is the Harvest Road pastoral business, which has six pastoral stations in Western Australia and a state-of-the-art beef processing facility at Harvey, south of Perth. It also has aquaculture operations at Albany, where the Leeuwin Coast seafood brand is based.

Harvey Road recorded EBITDA of almost $15m in 2019 from $343m revenue, according to financial accounts lodged with the corporate regulator earlier this year. At that amount, the business could be worth close to $150m based on listed companies with similar operations.

Tattarang’s property business Fiveight owns the 3000sq m The Swan mixed-use precinct in Perth, a 56ha logistics park about 15km from Perth’s CBD and apartment blocks in Karratha and Port Hedland in WA.

CoreLogic data also shows various Forrest companies having paid $1.7m for a coastal property at Gracetown, WA, $6.7m for two commercial assets in Fremantle, $3.35m for a Cottesloe house in Perth, $1.8m for a rural property in the NSW Southern Highlands and $16.3m for a mansion in Sydney’s Point Piper, among various property transactions.

Forrest also owns a maritime services business, SFM Marine, in WA, has struck a deal with the Papua New Guinea government to explore hydro power, and his Squadron Energy business helped buy out the ASX-listed Windlab.