THE road to riches is rarely straightforward — and it helps to have satellite navigation to guide you, as Harold Goddijn and his wife Corinne Goddijn-Vigreux have discovered after making £1 billion in only a few years.

The couple are behind the TomTom, which has become the world’s biggest maker of in-car sat-nav systems.

Aged 47 and 42, the newcomers to The Sunday Times Rich List zigzagged up various dead ends before hitting the super-highway to wealth.

Goddijn trained as an economist and worked for Psion, the handheld computer company that made neat gadgets but never hit the big time. Goddijn, however, built up some capital and met his future wife there.

They moved on to invest in Palmtop, another handheld computer company but some early products went nowhere. Then Goddijn alighted on car navigation systems, which at the time were luxury items.

“We installed it in our cars, we analysed the price and the route to market...we needed a lot of memory to store the map and we couldn’t get it, not at an affordable price,” he explained.

In 2001 the company had just 20 staff and revenues of £1.4m. But then computer chips rose in power and plummeted in price, sending TomTom roaring into the mass market. By 2005 the firm had sales of £490m and it floated as a public company, giving it a value of £1.2 billion. The growth has continued to be so explosive that the company is now worth £2.5 billion and the couple’s stakes make them billionaires.

Other pioneers of the electronic frontier include Michael and Xochi Birch, a husband and wife team in their mid-thirties. Both computer programmers, they spotted the potential of the internet for social networking.

Moving from London to San Francisco, the couple created the website Bebo in 2005 and saw its popularity skyrocket. Myspace, a similar site, was bought for $580m (£290m) in 2005 by News Corporation, parent company of The Sunday Times. Suitors are thought to have offered £300m for Bebo and the couple’s stake is an estimated £150m.

Tapping into technological and social trends is the key to the wealth of many newcomers to the list, the most prominent being computers, hedge funds, property, media and fashion.

But there are also mavericks such as Shwan al-Mulla, a London-based Iraqi Kurd. While the war in Iraq has blighted many lives, al-Mulla has profited from it. His business and construction interests have helped to rebuild the airport at Baghdad and hospitals and schools. With assets of £500m, he can live where he likes and has properties in Britain, France, Jordan and Florida.

More modest but youthful fortunes are being made in fashion. Kiera Chaplin, granddaughter of Charlie Chaplin, and Katie Price, better known as the model Jordan, have made £30m apiece. Chaplin is 24 and Price is 28.

Lily Cole, a model now acting in a new film of the St Trinian’s comedies about riotous schoolgirls, is estimated to have made £6m at just 18.

Kate Moss is still the model most in demand, and has also branched out into designing for TopShop. Her fortune is now £45m and she is the 99th richest woman in Britain.

Two other less glamorous, but more lucrative trends dominate the new entries. The first is finance, in particular hedge funds. Robert Kauffman, 43, co-founded Fortress Investment Group, a US hedge fund and now heads its European operations. He’s worth £800m.

Alexander Knaster, a Russian investor, is worth £570m, and Steven Heinz, co-founder of hedge fund Lansdowne Partners, is said to be worth £350m.

Property is the other big factor among the newcomers. At least nine of the richest new entries have made £135m or more from property or related activities.

They include the architect Lord Foster, whose flamboyant designs contrast with his coy attitude to wealth. Foster, 71, has not previously appeared in the list because his spokesman rejected suggestions that he merited it because of his 90% stake in Foster & Partners. But the private firm is now up for sale for £300m to £500m. It would make Foster’s stake, and other assets, worth at least £295m.

Younger property millionaires are less worried about acknowledging their wealth. Brothers Steve and Clive Boultbee Brooks own shopping centres in Britain, Sweden and Finland, making them jointly worth £300m, and spend their wealth indulging in adventure. Steve, 46, is the first person to drive across the ice of the Bering Strait from America to Russia, and the first to fly from pole to pole by helicopter.

£100m giveaway

In the 1990s they set about making money; this year they have given £100m of it away, writes Richard Woods.

The extraordinary story of David and Heather Stevens, who top this year’s Sunday Times Giving Index, is a paradigm of how British philanthropy is gathering momentum.

Their rise began at a restaurant near Waterloo station in London in 1992, where they met and later set up Admiral, an insurance firm, with an acquaintance.

Fifteen years later the couple have set up a charitable trust called the Waterloo Foundation and earlier this year transferred £100m of shares into it. The move leaves them with a remaining stake in Admiral of £115m.

The foundation will focus on global issues and local community projects. “This is deeply personal to us,” Heather said.

David remains chief operating officer of Admiral but Heather is to run the foundation, which will have an income of about £4m a year from its endowment.

This year’s top 10

1 Lakshmi Mittal and family £19,250m

2 Roman Abramovich £10,800m

3 The Duke of Westminster £7,000m

4 Sri and Gopi Hinduja £6,200m

5 David Khalili £5,800m

6 Hans Rausing and family £5,400m

7 Sir Philip and Lady Green £4,900m

8 John Fredriksen £3,500m

9 David and Simon Reuben £3,490m

10 Jim Ratcliffe £3,300m

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