Christo Wiese and Shoprite. The history of Africa’s most storied retail chain.

Christo Wiese is the brain behind Shoprite, Africa’s most storied retail chain.

A story is told of two shoe salesmen who went to a poor country to undertake due diligence because their parent company was looking to make a foray into the country. One of the salesmen sent back a telegram, saying: “There’s no market here because nobody here wears shoes,” and the other one sent a telegram back: “I’m elated because what a market – because nobody has shoes.”

That anecdote is reminiscent of South African billionaire Christo Wiese’s story. When Wiese went to Zambia in the early 1990s to open up a clothing store, he discovered that clothing was sold on the street pavement by hawkers. There were no clothes shops in the country, and a colleague from Pep Stores with whom he had made the trip told him, “You know, we can’t come and open shops here because people prefer to buy  their clothes from hawkers,” Wiese recalled during an interview with South Africa’s Leadership magazine.

Of course, Wiese went ahead and launched a Pepkor store in the southern African country. Needless to say, it thrived- just like all the other previous stores across the continent.

Today, Wiese is the largest individual shareholder and chairman of retail giants Pepkor, Shoprite and Tradehold, and one of the continent’s most successful entrepreneurs, with a net worth of $3.1 billion on Forbes’ 2012 World’s Billionaires List.

After acquiring a bachelors’ degree in law from the University of Stellenbosch, Wiese practiced at the Cape Bar for several years before taking up a job as an Executive Director at Pepkor, a discount clothing chain his parents had helped found. By 1979, Pep Stores made its foray into the food retailing business with its acquisition of Shoprite, a small chain of retail outlets spread across South Africa. Wiese assumed the position of chairman in 1981, and in 1982 he led the company to change its name from Pep Stores to Pepkor Limited.

With Wiese at the helm, the company made some audacious acquisitions. He acquired Ackermans, a clothing chain, in 1986. Subsequently, Pepkor listed its clothing interests on the JSE as Pep Limited and its food interests as Shoprite Holdings Limited. In 1991 Pepkor made four additional acquisitions. The company acquired the retail chains Smart Group Holdings, Cashbuild, Checkers and Stuttafords and in the same year, Wiese led the company to open its first retail outlet in Scotland.

Today, Pepkor is a renowned South Africa-based retail investment holding company with stores in 10 countries in Africa, as well as operations in Australia and Poland. The group owns a diverse portfolio of retail outlets centered on the low-price market, primarily selling textiles, clothing and footwear. Its main operating subsidiaries are Pep and Ackermans in South Africa and Best & Less in Australia, all based on a high volume/lower margin business model. The group has some 2,800 stores and employs almost 28,000 people.

Wiese has been the engineer of all this growth, and has reaped some handsome financial dividends in the long run. He is widely acknowledged as one of the richest men in Africa today. His combined interests in Pepkor and Shoprite- the continent’s largest retailer are currently worth $2.4 billion.

In addition to retail, the mogul has been involved with several other companies and sits on numerous corporate boards. Apart from serving as chairman of Pepkor, Shoprite and Tulca, he is on the board of South African media giant Primedia and financial services firm PSG Group Ltd.

Wiese is 70, but he says he’s not prepared to step aside anytime soon. “I believe I am good for another five to seven years,” he said last year during an interview with South Africa’s Moneyweb. Wiese’s eldest son, Jacob, 30, is part of the company’s key management staff and will look after the family’s interests in the company when Wiese retires.

Business aside, Wiese has been one of Africa’s most vocal economic optimists. Last year, he voiced his thoughts in an opinion article in Ernst & Young’s 2011 Africa attractiveness survey: “I’m extremely positive about investment in Africa. Africa has a wonderful climate, wonderful people and amazing possibilities. Africa has been called dark and hopeless, but today it is neither of these. Africa is awakening. It’s a huge market of almost a billion people with huge resources and a young population. It’s the best place to invest.”

Wiese has seen his own fair share of troubles, too. The South African billionaire is currently facing a legal battle to recover more than $1 million in cash that was seized from him in 2009 by British customs officials. Wiese had been carrying the cash in his personal hand luggage while attempting to board a flight from England to Luxembourg.

A British judge ordered that the money be seized on the suspicion that it was the proceeds of crime, but according to the Daily Mail, Wiese and his lawyers have explained that the money was part of profits from diamond deals in South Africa in the 80s and 90s and had been kept in a safety deposit box in the Ritz hotel because of foreign exchange restrictions in his homeland.

The case is still in court.

... to be continued

History of Aliko Dangote- “The Golden child”

DANGOTE GROUP OF COMPANIES LOGO

The First Nigeria’s Billionaire was born on the 10th of April year 1957. He is the founder of Dangote Group. He is considered one of the richest men in Africa.
He said “I assume I have to be rated by Forbes magazine prior to being called the richest man in Africa” But, you know, I’m very comfortable.

“He ranked first in Nigeria in Forbes Magazine’s 2008 list of the richest people in the world with a fortune estimated at 3.3 billion dollars.
Aliko Dangote is the ‘golden child’ of Nigerian business circles. The Dangote consortium spans across numerous sectors of the Nigerian economy The Dangote Group supplies commodities like cements ,sugar, salt, flour , rice, spaghetti, fabric etc at very competitive prices.

As a nonpartisan and detribalized businessperson, he is generous to different political parties, religious groups and cultural institutions.

Apart from offering employment opportunities to elite graduates from different ethnic backgrounds, he reduces the level of crime by engaging youths who are school leavers in the area of transportation, product packaging, security amidst others.

It may possibly not be a wild assumption to say that all Nigerian has heard of his name due to the impact of his business. His goods are practically in most homes across the country. People who may not use his products might have passed a few of his trailers by the way.

He’s into exporting, importing, manufacturing, real-estate and philanthropy. All of these are combined together to form what is known as the Dangote Group.
At the helm of its affairs as president and Ceo is definitely an humble person called Aliko Dangote. The focus of his investments is food, clothing as well as shelter.

The Dangote Group imports 400,000 metric tonnes of sugar annually which makes up about 70 % of the total requirements of the nation and is a major supplier of the product to the manufacturers of Coca Cola, Pepsi Cola and Seven-Up in Nigeria.

It imports 200,000 metric tonnes of rice annually just as the company imports tonnes of cement and fertilizer and building materials. Dangote Group also imports fish and owns three big fishing trawlers chartered for fishing with a 5,000 MT capacity. The group exports cotton, cocoa, cashew nuts, sesame seed, ginger and gum Arabic to several countries globally.

His Beginning

Born in Kano, his grand father, the late Alhaji Sanusi Dantata provided him with a small capital to start his own business, as was the practice then. He thus started business in Kano in 1977 trading in commodities and also building supplies.

Alhaji Aliko Dangote moved to Lagos in June 1977 and persisted in trading cement and commodities. Encouraged by tremendous success and increase in business activities, he incorporated two companies in 1981. These as well as others that followed now make up the conglomerate known as The Dangote Group.

Company Activities

Dangote Group today is associated with diverse types of manufacturing with good revenues. Dangote textile and the Nigeria Textiles Mills Plc, which it acquired, produce over 120,000 meters of finished textiles daily. The group has a ginnery in Kankawa, Katsina State with a capacity of 30,000 MT of seeded cotton annually.

The sugar refinery at Apapa port, Lagos is the largest in Africa and in size the third largest worldwide with an annual capacity of 700,000 tonnes of refined sugar annually. It also has another 100,000 tonne-capacity sugar mill at Hadeja in Jigawa State.

Besides having significant investment in the National Salt Company of Nigeria at Ota, Ogun State, the group has salt factories at Apapa as well as Calabar, a polypropylene bagging factory which produces essential bags for its products, over 600 trailers for effective distribution network and goods meant for export can also successfully be transported to the respective ports.

A vehicle leasing unit with over 100 fully air-conditioned commuter buses, is also part of the Dangote Group. It is also into real estate with luxury flats and high rise complexes in Ikoyi, Victoria Island, Abuja and Kano. Dangote Foundation is the philanthropic arm of the group where yearly he spends millions for worthy causes such as contributions to educational and healthcare institutions, sinking of boreholes and giving of scholarships.

The Dangote Group has nationwide staff strength of 12,000 but on completion of on-going projects, it is expected to hit 22,000. Alhaji Aliko Dangote’s business success may be influenced by various factors. He seems to be broad-minded. Unlike some people, his Personal Assistant is Yoruba while his Head of Corporate Affairs is a Christian from Delta State.

In this encounter, Dangote talks about his driving force in business, the factors that have kept him above his contemporaries in business, his $800 million cement factory at Obajana, Kogi State and the N14 million mega company, which he and some industrialists have set up. Perhaps above all, his patriotic stance is commendable: “If you give me today $5 billion, I will not invest any abroad, I will invest everything here in Nigeria. Let us put heads together and work.”

As a self-employed person, with minimum basic education, he proves that business success is usually through strength of mind, honesty and perseverance; and not necessarily by obtaining Harvard-Oxford certificates or First-Class academic qualification. His managerial skills surely are the envy of economic professors.

Instead of stashing his funds in foreign accounts, a typical feature of fraudulent front and public office looters, Dangote invests wisely in the productive sector of the Nigerian economy.To deny that Dangote doesn’t have monopoly over a few of the commodities in the Nigerian market is to deny the obvious.

Recently himself and other notable Nigerians announced their intention to float a private sector mega company with the name Transnational Corporation of Nigeria (TCN), which amongst other things may acquire government-owned refinery, operate strategic state-owned coys and pioneer status in Agriculture & Information Technology. SEE THE PICTURE OF THEN MAN BEHIND THE VISION.

History of Google- Searching for Success.

 

 

Google Office

Google. We all know its name and use its website probably more than any other websites. We also know that it is extremely successful and that its founders have become billionaires. Yet amazingly, 10 years ago, almost none of us had heard of it, let alone used it. Its growth has been more substantial than even most of the businesses that existed before it, but also faster than any.

THE BIRTH OF PAGERANK

Google hasn’t always been such a goldmine. In fact, when they started, Google’s co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin weren’t even sure how their site would make money.

The pair met at Stanford University in the spring of 1995, where they were both enrolled on its prestigious PhD computer science programme. Located in Silicon Valley, Stanford had already spawned some of the world’s most successful technology company, such as Hewlett-Packard and Sun Microsystems and the academic environment encouraged risk taking and entrepreneurship. Its office of technology licensing offered technologist’s resources, advice and assistance with the patent process to help its student’s commercialize their research projects in return for a stake in the businesses. It was also a stone’s throw from Sand Hill Road, home to some of the USA’s most successful ventures capital firms.

Sergey and Larry had both grown up surrounded by science and technology. Larry’s father was one of the first ever recipients of a computer science degree from the University of Michigan. His mother was a database consultant with a master’s in computer science. Read more!