How the fertiliser king of WA grew a $5b fortune with no one noticing

When Vikas Rambal left his home in India’s capital 25 years ago and landed in the remote West Australian Pilbara, he immediately sensed opportunity.

Visiting Karratha for the first time, Rambal, now 57, says he was struck by a gut intuition that he could pull off his life’s dream, and that WA was where he was meant to live.

“I said, ‘this country has everything – it has roads, it has gas, it has infrastructure – and if I can take the help of the state government, we can build [it]’.”

It took him 15 years and two attempts but Rambal’s belief in humanity’s critical need for fertiliser – a need, he says Australians have overlooked – has earned him a $4.98 billion fortune and catapulted him onto the 2025 Financial Review Rich List.

Rambal is building Project Ceres, named for the Roman god of agriculture, a giant $6.4 billion fertiliser plant on the Burrup Peninsula in WA’s far north-west.

“This is a humongous project, and it will put Australia on the map of fertiliser production, and we can be self-sufficient for our food,” Rambal tells The Australian Financial Review.

Australia imports about half the 5.4 million-plus tonnes of fertiliser used each year, a figure that leaps to 80 per cent for the nitrogen-based fertilisers, like those Rambal plans to produce.

Without fertiliser, nature struggles to replenish the nutrients in the soil. Plant growth, in turn, would be severely limited, leading to reduced crop yields and less food on Australian supermarket shelves.

Rambal’s intention is for Perdaman’s plant to replace all the imports.

“We take it for granted that materials will come from overseas,” Rambal says. “China manufactures roughly 60 million tonnes of urea, India manufactures around 30 million tonnes… If it didn’t, half of India’s population would die of hunger.

“This is analysis no one does. If you go to the Middle East, if you talk to the sheiks, they talk about fertiliser so much because they know how important it is to the community. Here, it took me 15 years to convert the project because people don’t understand.”

Rambal was born into an intellectual family in Delhi. His father, Perdaman Krishan Rambal, for whom the company is named, was a geologist for the Indian government.

Vikas studied chemical engineering at university; there were not many good choices at that time in India, he says.

He was good at mathematics, and he was attracted to big industries, but the IT sector was not yet thriving, so he considered mechanical, electrical, and chemical engineering.

Rambal went on to work for a range of petrochemical and fertiliser companies, including Bharat Petroleum. It was while working for Oswal Chemicals and Fertilisers that he came to Australia searching for business opportunities in WA.

“It was a very, very different country [to India]. It had a different way of working, and I thought if we were to be successful here, I had to relocate,” he says.

“The [way of] working in Australia is very methodical, but it’s a bureaucratic approach. So if we wanted to do something, [I needed to be here] to execute the plans.”

He says moving to Australia with his young family was a hard decision but necessary. “Basically, I had a clear view if I have to convert my dream.

“Now as I see myself established in Australia and I feel hopeful that the next generation will have a much easier threshold to cross.

“I always say India is Janam Bhoomi (motherland) where I am born and Australia is my Karam Bhoomi (the land gives food to my family and fulfils my dreams). Now Australia is our home and the future of the family.”

Rambal’s first foray into manufacturing in Australia became the stuff of business legend – for all the wrong reasons.

He partnered with his former employer’s son, Pankaj Oswal, to create Burrup Fertilisers and build what was then the world’s largest ammonia plant. It was completed, despite cost overruns and delays, and is run by Norway’s Yara.

Rambal, however, had a falling out with Oswal over the financial management and governance issues. Oswal found himself caught up in a suite of lawsuits with Rambal, the Australian Taxation Office, and ANZ Bank. Rambal wanted to put the company, then majority-owned by Oswal, into receivership.

But, he dropped the court action and split with Oswal in exchange for a settlement worth over $100 million.

Rambal, however, did not let the experience break him, saying he felt indebted to the people and agencies in Australia that had helped them complete the project.

“If I’d left the country with all the work we’d done, it wasn’t a fair go to the [Australian] community,” he says.

“I was very young, a stranger without a big balance sheet, and the people of Australia in different forms and shapes helped me convert my first fortune.”

It was after this experience that Rambal founded Perdaman Group in 2006, with the goal of taking on large manufacturing projects.

His first attempt under Perdaman was a $3.5 billion coal-to-urea plant in the south-west town of Collie, WA. The project, however, stalled after a coal supply agreement fell through and another agreement could not be secured.

Rambal, who still had an arsenal of a few hundred million dollars behind him, decided he wanted to diversify Perdaman after the Collie project’s collapse.

“I wanted to go into property, into solar and into the service industry,” he says.

“We converted our mandate… so that we were not relying on one project. It instilled in me that you cannot rely on one thing. That’s why we are a diversified group now.”

The group bought up commercial properties, including shopping centres, industrial spaces and residential areas. Combined, their value exceeds $100 million. The company owns assets such as the Port Coogee Village shopping centre, the Northam Boulevard shopping centre and The Village at Margs in the Margaret River region.

Next, Perdaman launched a solar energy business, building up a team to offer everything from clean energy consulting, project development, and asset management services.

Rambal also built two pharmaceutical businesses in India, including Sunrise International Labs, which it acquired in 2013. Collectively, they employ about 250 people.

Since then, it has expanded into childcare centres, global immigration services and is also building a 30 megawatt solar farm in Karratha.

Across all the business units, Perdaman employs around 350 people. Of these 80 to 100 are based in its Perth head office, with most focused on Project Ceres, which also employs 10,000 contractors.

“The only thing I know how to do is work. I don’t know fishing, I’m a very boring person, but I know how to convert businesses,” Rambal says

“We wanted the capital to be divided into sensible parts – learning, future growth, and then capital for mergers and acquisitions.”

The moment that changed everything for Rambal was a 2017 discussion with $41 billion oil and gas company Woodside Energy.

“I was not in the [Woodside] boardroom, but they wanted a tangible project. They wanted their domestic gas to be utilised properly, and they saw how much work we had done, how much money we had spent, and that we had a design ready,” Rambal says.

“They put a condition on us that if they gave us gas, they wanted progress reports every three months.”

In November 2018, Woodside signed a 25-year contract to supply 125 terajoules of gas per day for Perdaman to use in the urea plant.

Now, 6½-years later, the $6.4 billion fertiliser plant is 50 per cent complete. Once operational, it will take the natural gas, convert it into liquid ammonia, and then it is combined with carbon dioxide to produce urea. That urea is sold to farmers and used on crops.

Perdaman has also signed a 20-year offtake agreement with Incitec Pivot’s fertiliser subsidiary for up to 2.3 million tonnes per annum of urea fertiliser.

“It is one of the biggest ingredients for the livelihood of humankind,” Rambal says.

Globally, Rambal is concerned that the world is facing a “tsunami” and no one is paying attention. He believes there will be a shortage of urea, and a shortage of farmers by 2035, which will lead to food supply challenges.

While fertiliser is needed to enrich the soil and feed the planet, the process to make it is carbon-intensive.

Rambal believes the plant will be the greenest urea plant globally, but it will still emit 500 million to 600 million tonnes of carbon dioxide.

He has a plan, however, for the plant to achieve net zero by 2040. Underpinning this is carbon capture storage technologies to bury the carbon dioxide emitted deep underground, and converting its power sources to solar, wind and possibly hydrogen power. For this, it is working with a range of companies, including Siemens.

Afather of two sons in university, Rambal wants Perdaman to remain a family business.

Both are already working in the company. The eldest, Ishan, is focused on Project Ceres, while the youngest, Vashist, is working on the decarbonisation efforts and new business opportunities.

But just because they’re family, does not mean they can expect a free ride.

“Nothing will be free to them. [They have to show] strength, resilience, honesty and determination to look after people,” Rambal says.

“The only thing they get from us is an opportunity.

“From my experience, Australia is a place where individuals get a fair go.”