Richard Elman finds Noble Group successor

Richard Elman, who got his start as a scrap metals labourer before creating Asia's top commodities trader by revenue, surrounds himself with reminders of his hard-won success.

In his 18th-floor office in Hong Kong, the executive chairman of Noble Group keeps a photo of himself with former US president Bill Clinton, a lump of coal from Australia and two abstract paintings by Chinese artists.

The billionaire attributes part of his good fortune to the amber bead bracelet that he fiddles with on his wrist. He has worn it for more than 10 years after someone told him it kept bad energy out and good energy in.

"I am afraid to take it off," says Elman, a Briton, with a smile. "Sometimes, you gotta be lucky."

Elman, 72, founded Noble in 1986 and today presides over a commodities powerhouse with annual revenue of US$80.7 billion. That makes Noble as big as Illinois-based Archer Daniels Midland, the world's No 1 grain processor, and almost half the size of Glencore International, the biggest publicly traded commodities supplier, which has its headquarters in Switzerland.

Noble's meteoric rise has been fuelled by the decade-long commodities boom, a product of surging demand in emerging markets. It has roughly doubled in size every two years since 2001 by buying coal, soya beans and other commodities in countries such as Australia, Brazil and Indonesia and selling them to China, India and the Middle East.