Mr. Vijay Goradia is the Chairman of Vinmar Group of Companies, which he cofounded in 1978 in New York. He has helped the company to be grown into a global marketing in chemicals and plastics. Mr. Goradia has a degree in Finance and is involved in many different charities, most notably as the President of Pratham USA. He is also actively involved in mentoring entrepreneurs through the IndUS Entrepreneurs (TiE) organization in Houston.

Goradia started small. He traveled overseas, found potential buyers of plastic raw materials, then called back to the United States to find potential sellers. He only worked with small companies for the first few months. His big break came when a credit manager in New Jersey-based Allied Chemicals took a chance on him, he visited the offices of Allied Chemicals, a large company in Morristown, New Jersey, hoping to get a $2 million line of credit for plastic raw materials for a client in India.

Vijay move to United States in 1977, leaving his family-owned polymers business in Bombay to wander around the world for ten months. Travelling via road through Afghanistan, Iran, Turkey and Eastern and Western Europe for ten months, he survived on little money. In this mean while he learnt the tic tacts of the business and now as president of the Houston-based Vinmar International, a petrochemicals trading company with a turnover of $500 million, he specializes in zeroing in on trouble spots and emerging markets. 'Vinmar Goes Where Others Fear to Tread', was the headline of a story that Chemical Weekly, a leading trade journal, carried. 

Vinmar sells up to 1 billion pounds of resin in developing countries and Vietnam, Indonesia and China are just some of the countries where Goradia predicts the action will continue to be, for petrochemicals is a growth industry whose products go into everything from garbage bags to detergents to car interiors. Vinmar has offices in 22 countries including Russia, China, Mexico and Nigeria, and handles the show completely for its suppliers.

The ebullient 45-year-old entrepreneur specializes in identifying emerging markets, anticipating a need and taking on risks in virgin territories. Since the United States is the largest producer of petrochemicals and plastic raw materials in the world, Goradia started developing business in the Far East which imports a lot of chemicals. There the market was dominated by very large Japanese corporations with sales exceeding over $100 million. In a shrewd move, Goradia formed an alliance with one of the seven big players, and Vinmar became their defacto sourcing company.

In India Vinmar has five offices, and has got approval for setting up a grassroots chemical project in Dahej, Gujarat, where a port facility for handling imports of chemical products is being developed. Vinmar is also in a joint venture with an Indian company Flex to produce film for packaging purposes to be marketed in North and South America. Recently Vinmar signed a joint venture agreement with IPCL