The good life

Nobody could ever accuse the Petrochem boss of that. The 51-year-old multi-millionaire, with boundless charm and energy, is living the  life that most of us can only dare to dream about: the nine luxury cars, a customised nightclub in the basement of his villa, his summer mansion in London, and a collection of Bollywood’s biggest stars for pals.

Oh, and in between, there is the small matter of running the hugely successful Petrochem empire, a company he started from scratch in 1995 that today is raking in over a billion dollars a year in revenue. Make that $3bn by 2015, alongside an IPO that could well value the company at close to half a billion dollars.

Not bad for a guy who came to Dubai in at the age of 29 with no job, no plan and no future.  “I came here on a hope and prayer. But I had lots of dreams,” he explains.

Most of the dreams have turned to reality, with Mehta now at the helm of one of the world’s most prolific chemical distribution companies. It owns a state-of-the-art distribution terminal in Jebel Ali which cost $33m to build and that no rival has been able to match.

His global expansion plans have resulted in offices in Dubai, Jebel Ali, Mumbai, Antwerp and London, plus an office and distribution facility in Singapore and China. Today the company has exports of over 250,000 MT of products to the Middle East, Africa, Europe, the Indian subcontinent, the Far East and the Asia Pacific. Pick any country on the planet, and the chances are Petrochem has been involved somewhere down the line.

Little wonder that Mehta was ranked seventh in last year’s Arabian Business Indian Power List. Alongside the likes of Landmark founder Micky Jagtiani (a regular house guest) and Lulu Hypermarket supremo Yusuf Ali, Mehta is one of that elite group of Indian superstars now pulling the strings on a fair chunk of the region’s business.

But Mehta’s success masks his earlier struggles. Having first run a smaller chemical trading business in Bombay that ended in failure, he picked Dubai as his next move, 21 years ago. “I just said to my wife let’s go some place where there is more opportunity.”

Mehta spent his first two months in the emirate visiting the library each day to learn more about the region’s chemical industry, before starting a chemical division within a food company. But four years later, in 1994, he decided it was time to run his own show. “My wife said we have a car and four walls, let’s not change.  But I said let me start this, let me try it.  I have a dream to build a terminal,” he says.

With his business partner and friend David Lubbock, he founded the company and soon embarked on the project, building the Jebel Ali terminal in four phases. So impressive was the outcome, Mehta had in one swoop shut out most of the competition, as they simply couldn’t compete with his facilities. “That raised the bar for the industry. We did this to offer service to the end user a variety of chemicals. Right time, right place, finding the needle in the haystack,” he says.

The results were staggering, with Petrochem growing by 30 percent to 40 percent for the first few years after launch. Even by 2007, annual growth was still running at eighteen percent. Lubbock, who lives in London and manages the company’s European operations, has also played a huge part in Petrochem’s growth, and is someone Mehta describes as “more than a brother to me”.

But it hasn’t always been a walk in the park. September 2008 saw the collapse of Lehman Brothers and the global recession that followed. Mehta admits he was hit hard, very hard.

“We had a huge debacle. The whole world collapsed, we had our share of agony and losses. We got hit badly. Everything going north went south. We had a lot of products out there and lost value in them — we lost $17m in one year. I thought, will we come out of this? Will we lose everything?” he says, adding: “We had these bold ideas to sack 20 percent of the staff and reduce salaries for fifteen percent of staff. But these were silly ideas. I said no, these are people who have been with us for 20 years, what’s one year? And we had deep pockets. I said let’s ride this storm. I never for a second thought the ship was sinking but it was a huge hiccup. We made no money in 2008.”

But by 2009, facing the biggest crisis of his career, Mehta pulled off another masterstroke. “I thought, I know what to do — we started studying current values against future values. I felt the market would rise and made a calculated decision to make six-monthly contracts on the day’s numbers — and the market jumped 300 percent. In nine months, we made back all the money we lost,” he says.

Today, he says the business is “highly” profitable. Mehta is flirting with the idea of an IPO in India between 2014 and 2016 if the market conditions are right. And he doesn’t hide his motives for wanting to go down the stock market route.

“Yes it is to take some money. We’ve been working for seventeen years in this company — the money is invested in the company and that is the goal. We feel we have done that and it is time to take some profits and have a swansong. To enjoy the good life.”

Not that he isn’t already doing that. Mehta is famed for the extravagant parties he often throws at his villa in Emirates Hills, admitting he likes to “play very hard”. Many Bollywood celebrities are close pals, and Mehta was on stage at last year’s Masala Awards to present another friend, the actor Amitabh Bachchan, with a Lifetime Achievement Award.

“My house is made for parties; I have a nightclub in the basement. I like to enjoy the good things in life. The quest is to make your ends meet but once you move beyond that I think there are lots of good things that you can do in life,” he says, adding:  “With money, the power comes. With success, you are more powerful. Is power important? If you want to achieve things you need a bit of power, a bit of money, a bit of success… And what do you want to achieve? I want to do good for society. Do I need another million dollars? It’s not going to help me at all, I can’t even spend it. But I would like to achieve new heights of success, especially for the people in my company.”

Impressively, Mehta has managed to retain his “people’s” touch. Yes there are plenty of flashy cars in the garage, but each morning he also prepares a lunch for himself and three of his staff (any staff) to share with him. It’s something he has done for the past seventeen years, and sees no reason to ever stop. He talks as proudly about his new Bentley Mulsanne as he does about the daal and rice he made for the team yesterday. And these days, he spends as much time looking after the business as he does his employees, keen for them to also one day enjoy the fruits of success: “I always say to my staff that if you are not made and done, career and financially by 40, you never will be. At 40 you are at the prime of your life. They say life begins at 40 but really if you are not made, when will you be made? I knew this at 30. I knew I needed more jam, not just bread and butter. At 40 I had all of that, and I thought, yes, let’s enjoy it now.”

So what does the future hold for Mehta? Any future IPO will result in a huge cash windfall for the Petrochem founder, but despite his desire to enjoy life to the full, he has no intention of walking away from the business. The plans to hit $3bn in revenues by 2015 are on track, and the long-term dream of a $5bn company doesn’t look so distant.

Talking to him, it is hard to believe that Mehta is still a relatively youthful 51. Just seventeen years ago, Petrochem didn’t even exist. It has been a fast track to the top, with little time to look back. Any regrets? “I guess I made some mistakes in my growing up years which in hindsight should not have happened. But they don’t keep me awake at night, I fall sleep in three seconds.”