Gina Rinehart

Georgina Hope Rinehart AO (née Hancock, born 9 February 1954) is an Australian billionaire mining magnate and businesswoman. Rinehart is the Executive Chairman of Hancock Prospecting, a privately owned mineral exploration and extraction company founded by her father, Lang Hancock.

Rinehart was born in Perth, Western Australia, and spent her early years in the Pilbara region. She boarded at St Hilda’s Anglican School for Girls and then briefly studied at the University of Sydney, dropping out to work with her father at Hancock Prospecting. She was Lang Hancock’s only child, and when he died in 1992 she succeeded him as executive chairman. She turned a company with severe financial difficulties into the largest private company in Australia and one of the largest mining houses in the world.

When Rinehart took over Hancock Prospecting, its total wealth was estimated at A$75 million, which did not account for group liabilities and contingent liabilities. She oversaw an expansion of the company over the following decade, and due to the iron ore boom of the early 2000s became a nominal billionaire in 2006. In the 2010s, Rinehart began to expand her holdings into areas outside the mining industry. She made sizeable investments in Ten Network Holdings and Fairfax Media (although she sold her interest in the latter in 2015), and also expanded into agriculture, buying several cattle stations, divesting them within a decade.

Rinehart is Australia’s richest person. Her wealth reached around A$29 billion in 2012, at which point she overtook Christy Walton as the world’s richest woman and was included on the Forbes list of The World’s 100 Most Powerful Women. Rinehart’s net worth dropped significantly over the following few years due to a slowdown in the Australian mining sector. Forbes estimated her net worth in 2019 at US$14.8 billion as published in the list of Australia’s 50 richest people.^[10] However, her wealth was rebuilt again during 2020 due to increased demand for Australian iron ore, so that by May 2023, her net worth as published in the 2023 Financial Review Rich List was estimated in excess of A$37 billion; while in March 2021, The Australian Business Review stated her wealth equalled A$36.28 billion. As of September 2020 Forbes considered Rinehart one of the world’s ten richest women. Rinehart was Australia’s wealthiest person from 2011 to 2015, according to both Forbes and The Australian Financial Review; and again every year since 2020, according to The Australian Business Review and The Australian Financial Review.

The majority of Rinehart’s fortune is derived from her control of Hancock Prospecting, a closely held mining business.

The group is the holding vehicle for most of her family’s business interests. These include royalty rights that guarantee less than 1.25% of the annual revenue generated by some of the Hamersley Iron ore mines operated by publicly traded Rio Tinto.

The closely held company has a 50% interest in the Hope Downs mine in a joint venture with Rio Tinto, and undeveloped coal projects in Queensland.

The business is valued using its reported financials for the year ended June 30, 2022, and the average enterprise value-to-sales and price-to-book value multiples of two publicly traded peer companies Rio Tinto and Vale.

Livestock held by the group is valued separately based on the value disclosed in Hancock’s financials results.

A liability is included to reflect the provision for dividend payments to a family trust. The dividends cannot be paid until the dispute is resolved, according to an Oct. 31, 2019 statement from the company.

Table of Contents

Biography

Education: University of Sydney

Gina Rinehart is chairman of Hancock Prospecting, a company founded by her father Lang Hancock. In 1952, two years before she was born, Hancock, a pastoral farmer and bush pilot, flew over the outback in a small plane and while dodging a storm spotted a deep red color on the walls of a Pilbara river gorge. He suspected the scarlet streams of rock that ran for miles were oxidized iron.

Hancock explored and collected ore samples that he later found were superior to that used in US steel mills, but at the time, the government claimed Australia’s mineral resources were limited and had banned iron ore exports. He lobbied to lift the ban and staked claims to the richest deposits, striking a deal with Rio Tinto in the 1960s that entitled him to a perpetual royalty stream for some of the iron ore mined in the Pilbara. He also promoted cross-country railways to ship ore and coal, and pushed the development of ports on both sides of the country.

Rinehart assumed control of the business when her father died in 1992. The estate she received was bankrupt and, in her early years as chairman, growth opportunities were limited because many of the assets had already been sold or mortgaged. She secured new exploration licenses in 1993 and began drilling to determine the feasibility of a new mining project called Roy Hill. When China’s economy began to boom in the mid-2000s, demand and prices for iron ore rose, and by 2010 she’d attracted investment from South Korean steelmaker POSCO to help develop Roy Hill. The operation made its first shipments in 2015.

Rinehart expanded into media and agriculture, more recently reducing her interests in one and increasing them in the other. She resigned from the board of Ten Network Holdings in 2014 and the following year sold a 15% stake in newspaper business Fairfax Media. The sale of S Kidman & Co, Australia’s biggest agricultural property, to Rinehart and a Chinese partner, was approved by the Australian government in December 2016. The A$386.5 million ($290 million) deal included pastoral leases across Western Australia, the Northern Territory, Queensland and South Australia.

A dispute erupted with two of her four children in 2012 concerning a family trust, which received widespread attention in the local media. She was accused of secretly pushing back the vesting date of the trust — which holds 23.5% of Hancock — and of acting with “gross dishonesty,” according to a March 2012 media report. The case, which involved issues of control and capital gains taxes, ended in 2015 when the New South Wales Supreme Court appointed one of her daughters as trustee.

Net worth

Rinehart is one of Australia’s richest people, with Forbes estimating her net worth in 2019 at US$14.8 billion as published in the list of Australia’s 50 richest people, and The Australian Financial Review estimating her net worth in 2023 at A$37.41 billion—the wealthiest Australian as published in the 2023 Financial Review Rich List. Forbes considers Rinehart one of the world’s richest women.

Rinehart first appeared on the 1992 Financial Review Rich List (at the time called the BRW Rich 200, published annually in the BRW magazine, following the death of her father earlier that year. She has appeared every year since, and became a billionaire in 2006. Due to Australia’s mining boom in the early 21st century, Rinehart’s wealth increased significantly since 2010, and she diversified investments into media, taking holdings in Ten Network Holdings and Fairfax Media. According to BRW, she became Australia’s richest woman in 2010, and Australia’s richest person in 2011, and the first woman to lead the list. During 2012, BRW claimed Rinehart was the world’s richest woman, surpassing Wal-Mart owner Christy Walton.