It can happen........

From the AFR back in 2008

Twiggy made me a billionaire

Brett Clegg and James Chessell with Michael Vaughan, Jo Clarke and John Kehoe

May 9, 2008 – 10.00am

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Look out all you billionaires, K.C. Wong has crashed your club.

Thanks to the incredible rising share price of iron ore upstart Fortescue Metals Group, the decidedly low-profile Kie Chie Wong of southern Sydney has become one of the wealthiest people in the country.

Riding the coat-tails of Fortescue founder and major shareholder Andrew Forrest, Mr Wong has turned an initial outlay of less than $1 million into $1.2 billion in the space of just five years.

In 2003, the Malaysian-born Mr Wong amassed a stake through his private family company, Emichrome, at penny dreadful prices of between 1¢ and 3¢ a share, adjusted for subsequent capital changes. Fortescue stock last traded at $9.09.

That is a spectacular return for a man who drives a Honda, lives in a pleasant but unspectacular brick home in a southern Sydney suburb - with wife Ann and two sons - and counts buying a stake in real estate franchise Richardson Wrench back in 1988 as his most high-profile Australian deal.

Mrs Wong told The Australian Financial Review last night that she and her husband did not want to talk about their Fortescue investment.

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FMGFortescue Metals Group

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Updated: Apr 29, 2023 – 3.53pm. Data is 20 mins delayed.

View FMG related articles Mr Wong joins the likes of cardboard-box king Richard Pratt, property mogul Frank Lowy and mining heiress Gina Rinehart in the billionaires club.

He will not make the BRW Rich List, however, because he is believed to remain a Malaysian citizen.

The thousand fold increase in Fortescue shares has made many people rich but none more so than Mr Forrest whose personal fortune of $9.3 billion makes him Australia's richest man on paper.

"One of the delightful parts about Fortescue is the creation of wealth for shareholders," Mr Forrest told the AFR.

"It is clear when you see the KC Wongs and [16 per cent shareholder] Harbingers and the like, who backed us with their cheque books, that they saw the honesty, determination and vision of what we were doing."

It is understood that Fortescue is not the first time Mr Wong has backed the man known in mining circles as "Twiggy".

Public records show Emichrome was an investor in West Australian laterite nickel miner Anaconda Nickel before it was renamed Minara Resources and it still holds 3 million shares in that group worth some $18 million.

Anaconda has a colourful history and there are suggestions Mr Forrest managed to alienate many investors during its development. But Mr Wong and Mr Harbinger were both early investors in Anaconda, suggesting Mr Forrest's following might be stronger than suspected.

Emichrome also appears on the top 20 lists of a series of little-known listed companies such as Electro Optic Systems Holdings, Monarch Gold Mining Company, Regis Resources and Tasmania Mines. These investments have yet to scale the dizzying heights of Fortescue.

Mr Wong's first significant Australian investment was the country's oldest and largest real estate franchise, Richardson and Wrench. Mr Wong was member of a mainly Malaysian consortium - which included eastern suburbs property developer Michael Sanchez - that bought RW in May 1988.

It was reported at the time that Mr Wong was a representative of Malaysian investment house WTK Group, which had timber, mining and transport interests in South-East Asia, Japan, Europe and North America.

Mr Wong also has extensive property interests in Sydney and sat on the boards of private development vehicles Rekavu Pty Ltd and Benchmark Developments NSW.

The main game, however, is iron ore and its poster child is Fortescue.

Mr Forrest was triumphant yesterday at a Macquarie Securities conference in Sydney, telling delegates that the first commercial shipment to China's largest steel maker, Baosteel, will sail on May 15 and that he already has stockpiles at port to fill two more ships.

His achievements followed several years of investor scepticism and resistance from industry rivals BHP Billiton and Rio Tinto which cast doubts on the quality of Fortescue's assets and his bold plans to use surface mining techniques that had never been applied before to an iron ore deposit.

Fortescue claims to have reserves of 120 million tonnes, which can support a 20 year mine life at 45 million tonnes a year. But he expects to expand significantly, with detailed consideration to the next phase of development to begin in July.

Mr Forrest also pushed his vision yesterday of a shared infrastructure network in the Pilbara region of north-west Australia, despite the continued resistance of BHP and Rio, which are fighting Fortescue in the courts to maintain single-user rights over existing rail and port facilities.

Fortescue has recently garnered respectability among the investment community, despite few major fund managers owning shares in the miner.

Goldman Sachs JBWere recently upgraded its share price target to $9.62 a share and made a "buy" recommendation to clients.

"In our view, Fortescue used to be an investment based on a company challenging the majors in their backyard with a lower-quality ore body that was to use, and perhaps needed, new technology to make it work - and at a lower capital and operating cost," wrote analyst Neil Goodwill.

"Today Fortescue is about providing desperate customers with a better-grade ore than they have been using and customers that are keen and able to help Fortescue achieve its goals both in terms of the current operation and planned expansions."