If you’re a Safaricom subscriber, a diehard drinker of EABL products, you make him filthy rich
By GW Ngari
Editor-at-Large
Reclusive billionaire Dr John Kibunga Kimani, one of the country’s high roller serial investors, can get lost in a crowd of three. Until recently, there was no photo of him in the public domain. He has no active social media presence. Yet, if you’re a Safaricom subscriber, a diehard drinker of EABL and KWAL products or prefer fueling at Total petrol stations, you make or made him filthy rich.
So do those who buy locally assembled Isuzu vehicles, tenants at Two Rivers Mall and all parents and schools who buy books from Longhorn Publishers. Or get loans from Platinum Credit. Add too the over 30 airlines serving meals to passengers from the Jomo Kenyatta International Airport, Nairobi.
Kibunga’s investments at the Nairobi Securities Exchange (NSE) kiss the Sh4 billion ceiling from significant stakes in East African Breweries and Centum which has quotable stakes in Isuzu East Africa, Longhorn, NAS Servair and Two Rivers.
Kibunga holds shares worth Sh500 million in Safaricom making him the second largest individual shareholder
His shares in Safaricom are worth Sh500 million making Kibunga the second largest individual shareholder- after Ramaben Patel.
By April 2020, Safaricom shares cost Sh20 a throw when lockdowns started, but found legs when the telco proved to be one of the few pandemic proof local companies: Share prices are now sprinting past Sh40 meaning Kibunga has doubled his paper wealth in 10 months!
Kibunga is also the second largest individual investor at Kakuzi with a 32 percent stake valued at Sh2.3 billion and which has been ripening for over 30 years on the back of avocados, macadamia, tea, commercial forestry, blueberries and livestock operations.
Kibunga uses one investment strategy: buy big, hold long!
Kibunga’s disposable income is creamed from international consultancies from the likes of the World Bank and Danida and then pumped into the NSE where Kibunga has relentlessly pursued the Kakuzi stock.
Kibunga, 73, uses one investment strategy: buy big, hold long: “I started buying Kakuzi shares when the original colonial settlers were the majority shareholders. Since then, I have consistently built the stake to the current level,” he wrote in a letter to the editor at Business Dailyin 2018.
The stock market, as a cardinal creation of capitalism has been one ‘engine for the creation of endless wealth’
He continued: “My association with Kakuzi transcends being a shareholder. I was born in Kakuzi and so were my parents. Kakuzi is the only place I can call home as I grew up there. As a young boy, I worked in the company’s coffee and sisal plantations. Inevitably, Kakuzi influenced my education as well as career orientation.”
Kibunga, who attended Makerere, Reading and the University of Sussex, has made the NSE his financial playground. British business writer Robert Heller in The Age of the Common Millionaire notes that the stock market, as a cardinal creation of capitalism has been one “engine for the creation of endless wealth, which might, in the extreme cases, be unsupported by any concrete foundation,” and Kibunga has been a beneficiary.
But on the flip side, the stock market can be a bread of sorrow as the dipping fortunes for shareholders in Uchumi supermarkets, Mumias Sugar, Kenya Airways, Kenya Power, Eveready, Home Africa, Transcentury and Nation Media attest.
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