... is (or are) an astonishing success story for British industry. Ineos was founded by Ratcliffe in 1998, and in 2019 Wikipedia was describing it as being "in the top two chemicals companies in the world as measured by sales revenue currently around $90 billion." Ratcliffe is still its Chairman and CEO, and still holds 60% of its shares. He was named in May 2018 as the UK's richest man.
Quite what Ineos does is not easy to summarise in layman's terms. Its markets include fuels, lubricants, "packaging and food", and construction; geographically, Germany, the USA, UK, France and Benelux account for 67% of its earnings. Under Products, Wikipedia lists over twenty separate businesses, whose individual products are mainly listed as individual chemicals (ammonia, nitric acid, esters, biodiesel, chlorinated paraffins, etc. – and that's just the first two businesses).
Jim Ratcliffe himself was born in 1952 in Failsworth, Lancashire (now in Greater Manchester). His father was a joiner and his mother an accounts clerk, and his family moved to East Yorkshire when he was ten years old. He graduated in chemical engineering at the University of Birmingham, and in 1980 he obtained an MBA from the London Business School. He founded Ineos in order to buy out Inspec, a company that he had also helped to found, and to buy the freehold on a former BP chemical site in Belgium (which Inspec had been leasing). In 2018 his net worth was estimated at just over £21 billion.
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