Business
Phuti Mahanyele and Shanduka Group- Catering to Africa’s Middle Class
Phuti Mahanyele – CEO of Black Economic Empowerment Company Shanduka Group. PHOTO/Fati Moalusi
Phuti Mahanyele wants to bring Africa the Big Mac.
For two years, Ms. Mahanyele has overseen one of South Africa’s most successful Black Economic Empowerment firms. After the country’s first post-apartheid elections in 1994, the government enacted the Black Economic Empowerment legislation, which compels domestic and multinational companies operating in the country to meet such benchmarks as black ownership, skills training and development in poor communities.
Shanduka Group, like South Africa’s other Black Economic Empowerment firms, has helped foreign companies meet the country’s legal requirements for boosting black-owned business and training non-white employees. Black Economic Empowerment legislation says companies need to have 25 percent black ownership by 2017, so many team up with businesses like Shanduka, making them investment partners. As such, Shanduka has forged ties with some of the world’s biggest multinationals: McDonald’s Corporation; Cocoa-Cola Co. and Glencore International PLC.
Shanduka employs 65 people and has an enterprise value, a measurement of market capitalization, of 13 billion rand (US$1.56 billion). While many Black Economic Empowerment companies simply take equity stakes in their partnerships, Ms. Mahanyele has helped push her company to be an active manager in its investments rather than a passive equity holder. And while many investors have moved to the sidelines in South Africa amid uncertainty over the country’s plans to nationalize its mines, she has accelerated Shanduka’s mineral purchases, closing a deal with partner Glencore this year to get a controlling stake in the country’s sixth-largest coal miner, Optimum Coal Holdings Ltd.
Last year, Shanduka spent 2 billion rand (US$ 242 million) on new acquisitions, including increasing its shareholding in the coal sector. Shanduka’s growth strategy has added financial fire power—at the end of last year, China’s sovereign wealth fund acquired a 25 percent stake in the company, a move Ms. Mahanyele hopes will open new avenues of funding to enable investment in things such as longer term, resource-related infrastructure projects.
But now Ms. Mahanyele not only wants to help her blue-chip partners at home, she wants to follow them into the rest of Africa. But to do so successfully will depend much more than before on Ms. Mahanyele’s business acumen, rather than on her company’s stellar political connections.
“As soon as they press the button we’re there,” the 41-year-old chief executive says of the group’s partnership with McDonald’s.
