"It still is a very flat organization," Banga says, but five years ago they brought in a Brazilian chief operating officer, Ricardo Leiman, to run day-to-day operations in Hong Kong. The two of them managed Noble together, taking turns going on trips until five years ago, when the company's 20%-a-year growth clip finally made it too big. Back then Noble's eight employees crowded into just a room and a half, in the very same office building in Hong Kong where the firm now sits.
Elman hired Banga, who now owns 9% of the company, to start Noble's iron ore and logistics businesses. Both had grown frustrated with the bureaucracy in big companies.
Vice Chairman Harindarpal (Harry) Banga remembers when Elman recruited him two decades ago. It is expanding fast in emerging markets, with more and more of the goods it handles winding up in China. Now it manages shipments around the world from more than 100 offices, including a recently enlarged one in Stamford, Conn. Noble Group sits in Hong Kong but is listed in Singapore, a center of maritime trade. Today Elman has in some ways re-created Phibro's business in Asia but has modernized and globalized it, mirroring the changes in the global economy. Most recently, following objections to the $100 million bonus due one of its traders, Citi sold Phibro to (Phibro's new parent merged with Travelers Group's Smith Barney into Salomon Smith Barney, and eventually Phibro became To his dismay, Phibro was sold to Salomon Brothers, which Elman says "destroyed" the passionate, can-do modus operandi he had helped nurture there.
Unlike Clavell's character, whose nickname means "chief executive" in Cantonese, he wasn't trading opium but something else China craved: the raw materials it would need to industrialize a backward nation. By the late 1970s Elman's Phibro was handling 5% of mainland China's growing foreign trade. Elman ran Phibro's Southeast Asia business from Hong Kong and started its China business. Later he became Asian regional director for the renowned commodities trader Philipp Brothers. He worked his way up, and within a few years the steel scrap business had taken him to San Francisco, then to Tokyo, then to Thailand and India. His father, a barrister, found him work "as a coolie in a scrap yard," Elman says. In November it reported better than expected profits in the most recent quarter.Įver understated, Elman, a 69-year-old Englishman who owns a quarter of the company and is worth $2.2 billion, says that "2009 is turning out to be okay," despite his fears early this year that the firm would be walloped by the global economic downturn-and despite a big revenue and earnings dip from last year's commodity-price highs.Įlman grew up in Brighton and quit school at 15. All told, Noble raised nearly $4 billion in the space of two months, a war chest it can use as a safeguard or for expansion as rivals struggle. At the end of October Noble had pulled off the largest syndicated corporate loan in Asia so far this year, a $2.4 billion credit line, and it tidied its balance sheet with longer-term notes. Had joined Standard & Poor's and Fitch in upgrading Noble's debt to investment grade. In mid-September Chinese sovereign wealth fund China Investment Corp.
Commodities-heavy Noble made it look easy, and though no longer benefiting from price spikes, it is sailing through 2009's choppy seas, too. But holders of its shares appreciate its 26% annual average returns since March 1997, when it began trading.įor most companies 2008 was wrenching. Although nearly half its sales are to or from North America, Noble doesn't enjoy the recognition here of a Cargill or an Noble has grown from a small-time metals trader to a commodities merchant and supply-chain manager with revenue last year of $36 billion, up 54% from 2007. But only 20 miles north, beyond Hong Kong's skyscrapers, lies much of Noble Group's future: mainland China. Elman need only turn his head away from the flat-panel computer screens on his desk today for a panoramic view of the Hong Kong harbor, where global trade has flourished since the days of his company's fictional namesake.
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