All the companies billionaire Patrice Motsepe owns — including a big broadband provider

Patrice Motsepe is one of South Africa’s most successful businessmen, with an estimated net worth of around $3 billion (R55.35 billion).

Motsepe became South Africa’s first black billionaire and the first black African to make the Forbes Richest list in 2008. In May 2024, he ranked as the 1,175th wealthiest person in the world.

The 62-year-old is best known as the founder and executive chairman of African Rainbow Minerals (ARM), which has interests in mines that extract gold, platinum, base metals, and ferrous metals.

Since 2021, Motsepe has become a more familiar face to African football fans as the president of the Confederation of African Football. This position automatically made him a vice president of Fifa.

He also has a majority share in the Mamelodi Sundowns and owns over a third of Blue Bulls rugby.

Those in the business world will know Motsepe has various other shareholdings in companies serving various industries.

These include telecoms, insurance, asset management, agriculture, energy, and real estate businesses, which fall under the African Rainbow Capital (ARC) umbrella.

Learning business in a spaza shop

Patrice Thlopane Motsepe comes from Ga-Rankuwa, a settlement north of Pretoria, and is the son of chief Augustine Motsepe of the Mamkau branch of the Tswana people.

His father was a schoolteacher and later owned a spaza shop, where Motsepe was taught basic business skills.

The shop also proved popular with miners, giving Motsepe a first-hand perspective of their experiences.

Motsepe’s father later became a successful liquor distributor through his affiliation with South African Breweries.

Motsepe’s first tertiary qualification was a BA degree at the University of Swaziland. He went on to complete a law degree specialising in mining and business at the University of Witwatersrand.

His first major career milestone was when he was appointed the first black partner at Bowman Gilfillian in 1994, after joining six years earlier.

After leaving the law firm, Motsepe leveraged South Africa’s Black Economic Empowerment laws to build his mining enterprise.

He founded Future Mining, a company that provided gold dust cleaning services for the Vaal Reefs Gold mine.

A part of the company’s success was due to the worker remuneration system that consisted of a low base salary with a profit-sharing bonus.

In the late 1990s, Motsepe scooped up multiple marginal gold mines from AngloGold and formed ARMgold, which would become the source of his initial wealth.

This would lead to the establishment of ARM in 2004 after ARMgold merged with Harmony and acquired Anglovaal Mining.

He has also enjoyed success in financial services through Ubuntu-Botho Investments (UBI), which

On an international level, Motsepe is a member of the Board of Trustees of the World Economic Forum (WEF), the Global Network Advisory Board of the WEF Centre for the Fourth Industrial Revolution and the WEF International Business Council (IBC).

He also serves on the Harvard Global Advisory Council and the International Council on Mining and Metals.

From mining to telecoms

Telecoms have been the biggest contributor to Motsepe’s wealth in recent years. ARC has a large shareholding in mobile network Rain, which contributes the most to the value of its ARC Fund portfolio.

Initially focused on uncapped LTE products, Rain became the country’s first mobile network to offer fixed-5G connectivity in 2019.

It launched a fully-fledged mobile network in mid-2023, with 4G SIMs available exclusively in a bundle with its 5G packages called RainOne.

In the last six months of 2023, ARC invested another R81 million in Rain, taking its shareholding in the mobile operator to 20.75%.

The value of its effective interest in the operator increased by another R222 million due to re-evaluation.

Based on that assessment, ARC’s share in Rain is worth about R4.819 billion.

“The increase in valuation can be attributed to the business progressing past the significant net cash outflow and the subsequent launch of RainOne,” ARC said.

“The performance of RainOne in the current period has been pleasing and customer growth is encouraging.”

Another major success in the ARC stable is TymeBank, which has seen explosive customer growth since launching in early 2019.

The table below provides an overview of Motsepe’s holdings.