Falling commodity prices erase billions from Dangote, Motsepe fortunes

The collapse in commodity prices and the rise of the African middle class has flipped the fortune trends of the continent’s richest people.

Commodities tycoons Aliko Dangote and Patrice Motsepe have lost almost US$4 billion in 2015, while Nigerian telecom billionaire Mike Adenuga and South African retail mogul Christo Wiese have added almost $2 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.

“The go-go years of African billionaires whose wealth has been built around oil is over,” said Martyn Davies, CEO of Johannesburg, South Africa-based investment research firm, Frontier Advisory. “We have placed far too much emphasis on a handful of people making significant capital through distorted-priced resources. True wealth creation is where billionaires are created from non-resource assets.”

Growth in Africa’s middle class has increased demand for services, an African central bank governor said in June, while a recent study from South African research company New World Wealth labeled construction, financial services and property development as leading sources of future wealth creation on the continent, according to a Bloomberg report today.

Adenuga’s fortune has been boosted by 6 million more subscribers at his mobile phone company, Globacom, since April 2014.

Adenuga has added US$489 million to his US$4.4 billion fortune this year.

Aliko Dangote, Africa’s richest person, amassed a US$21 billion fortune by founding Nigeria’s biggest cement producer and has lost US$3.6 billion in 2015. He also owns stakes in oil fields and is building the country’s biggest oil refinery.

South Africa’s Patrice Motsepe, who has a US$1.6 billion fortune, is chairman and founder of African Rainbow Minerals, an iron-ore and platinum miner whose shares have fallen 41 percent in 2015, helping to push his fortune down US$329 million this year.

Africa has 8 billionaires among the 400 world’s richest people, with a combined US$54 billion in wealth.

Source: Bloomberg Business