Profile: Patrice Motsepe

Patrice Motsepe (who was born in 1962), is a South African mining magnate.

Motsepe is the Executive Chairman of African Rainbow Minerals Limited, ARM, a leading, niche-diversified mining and minerals company, based in Johannesburg, South Africa. He is also the non-executive Chairman of Harmony and the Deputy Chairman of Sanlam. He is also the President of Business Unity South Africa (BUSA), which is the voice of organised business in South Africa.

Motsepe began his business career as a child when he would wake early to help his entrepreneurial father by selling liquor to mine workers at his father’s shop.

He then went on to earn a BA from University of Swaziland and a law degree from the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits).

In 1994 he became the first black lawyer to be made a partner at the law firm Bowman Gilfillan, where he specialized in mining and business law.

He then started a contract mining operation called Future Mining which provided various services to Vaal Reefs gold mine, now part of AngloGold. He then bought low-producing gold mine shafts in 1994, turned them profitable using a lean, mean management style.

Motsepe formed the African Rainbow Minerals (ARM) in 1997 and acquired more marginal shafts at Vaal Reefs in January 1998 on favorable financial terms, followed by the purchase of other marginal shafts owned by AngloGold in the Free State.

Todate, he is the biggest single shareholder of the world’s fifth-largest gold mining company. His firm, African Rainbow Minerals, controls 19.8 per cent of Harmony. His family trust owns 43.1 per cent of ARM. Forbes magazine ranks him as 336th richest person in the world, and South Africa’s first black billionaire with an estimated net worth of $3.3 billion dollars.

Harmony Gold Mining Company specializes in turning old digs into new digs. Harmony is South Africa’s largest gold miner, after acquiring ARMgold in 2003, and the sixth largest in the world. The company buys mature gold mines with lagging production and turns them into low-cost, high-productivity mines.

Sources: The Habari Network; Forbes