Naushad Merali has spent a lifetime making deals at the speed of light; deals that turned him into one of the richest men in East Africa. How did he do it?
The tea and telecom tycoon was a new entry, at number 39, on the 2012 FORBES AFRICA ‘Africa’s 40 Richest People’ list, with a personal fortune of $410 million.
Not bad for a man who started life as a humble finance clerk in a Nairobi garage. Merali was a young man when he joined the finance department of Ryce Motors—a company he would one day own. All he had on his mind, in those days, was making ends meet for his family. Fate lent a hand one day, when Merali was 24 and his boss took him to one side.
“The owner, Frank Ryce was getting old and wanted to go back to Germany. So I thought to myself, ‘Why should I let this company go after working here for so long?’ I went for it,” says Merali.
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He took a loan of Ksh200,000 (around $2,350 at the current exchange rate) from Bank of America, now known as Commercial Bank of Africa (CBA), in 1975 to buy Ryce Motors. The amount from the bank was a third of what he needed, but Ryce agreed to take the money as a down payment.
Merali’s life transformed overnight as he became managing director. He was no longer worrying about putting food on the table; he was now worrying about: running a company; paying employees on time; repaying his first loan and honoring his commitment to Ryce.
“The company had a lot of potential and never once did I doubt the decision I had made,” he says.
Ryce Motors was housed in a warehouse that doubled as a showroom, with a petrol station next door. Merali wasted no time; he found a bigger warehouse in which the business could expand.
As money came in, so did investment opportunities. Six years into managing Ryce Motors, an opportunity came to invest into construction company H. Young &amp; Co. and this became Merali’s first buyout. His revenue was growing, so was his confidence and soon he found himself rubbing shoulders with the Kenyan elite.
Merali remembers the day, in 1985, when he walked into CBA and walked out its proud owner.
“You see, I signed a deal of $600,000 but believe me, I only had $6 in my pocket and had 90 days to complete it,” he says with a smile.
His family and friends thought he was mad.
“A family friend even asked my wife to have my mental status checked,” he says.
“When I came back and bought the bank, suddenly people were interested to participate and so I formed a consortium,” he adds.
It was a turning point: the consortium included the family of the first president of Kenya, Jomo Kenyatta. The CBA acquisition was, at that time, one of Kenya’s biggest buyouts by a Kenyan. This was the first acquisition in his buying spree that included: First National Bank of Chicago; Firestone East Africa; Eveready East Africa and Sasini.
“Our specialty is buyouts. The company has grown from zero to the current state, where we employ over 24,000 people in Kenya alone. Turnover for the group is over a billion dollars,” says the 61-year-old.
To order these acquisitions, Merali formed a holding company for his business empire and named it after his son, Sameer. Today, the Sameer Group runs five agriculture companies, including Sasini; Savanna Coffee Lounge; Sameer Industrial Park; a corporate showroom along Mombasa Road; Eveready Head Office and Ryce Engineering.
In the finance sector, Sameer Group owns shares in Equatorial Commercial Bank, alongside Kenya Data Networks in the information technology sector. Sameer Industrial Park is a premier export processing zone, which was established in 1991. Sameer has ownership in Kenya’s second largest mobile phone service provider, Airtel, and owns tire maker Yana Tyres and Yansam East Africa Motors. Merali also has properties in London, Dubai and across Africa.
The company has spread beyond Kenya. It owns 33% of Farmsecure, a South African agricultural company, and has dairy operations in Uganda. The latter came about when Ugandan president Yoweri Museveni, approached Merali for a solution to the struggling dairy industry in his country. Merali, together with the RJ Corporation of India, revived the industry from a daily production of 25,000 liters to 450,000, through 39 processing plants. The Dairy Corporation also ventured into the production of powdered milk, resulting in Uganda becoming a milk exporter, rather than importer.
Today, Sameer Agriculture and Livestock in Uganda exports to Yemen, Egypt, South Sudan, Tanzania, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Burundi and parts of Rwanda. The Ugandan operation inspired Merali to launch a milk processing company in Kenya called Daima.
Merali’s company owns majority shares in Sasini, one of the biggest tea and coffee producing and processing companies in Kenya, which has 12,000 acres of tea and coffee plantations. At the plantations, in Kiambu, 12km outside of Nairobi, one acre of land is valued at an average of Ksh30 million ($351,981), which makes the land worth Ksh260 billion or close to $4.3 billion. That is just a fraction of his assets, which include stocks and properties in prime locations across Nairobi.
“It’s always difficult to put a figure to it and this is not all investment. We borrow money. That is why I wonder how to put a value to my worth,” he says.
Merali attributes a huge part of his success to instinct. He bought Sasini from a complete stranger on a plane headed to London.
“There was this fellow next to me and we started talking about what he was doing in Kenya. He said that he had come from a board meeting for Sasini, but I did not know what Sasini was,” says Merali.
It turned out the man on the plane was the chairman of Mercanta, a company listed in the United Kingdom (UK).
At the end of the conversation, Merali was not only taken by the idea of a tea and coffee plantation, but wanted to put his money into it too.
“Do you want to sell?” Merali asked him.
When he was questioned about whether he had a background in tea and coffee, he responded to the challenge by bragging that he knew Africa and asked for a price.
“He said GBP 10 million and we shook hands. That was on May 1, 1989 and on June 1, he had his check and I had his company!” Merali says with pride.
In the end, Merali bought 43% of the company and, 24 years later, is very happy with that decision as the company has grown tremendously.
This is one of Africa’s great migrant entrepreneur stories. Merali’s great-grandfather came from India and settled in Lamu, along Kenya’s coast, in 1883. The family lived there until Merali’s father moved to Mombasa, where Merali was born in February 1951. In those days, it was easy to move around East Africa. The family moved from Kenya to Moshi, Tanzania, where Merali attended primary school with his three brothers and three sisters.
In 1967, when the then Tanzanian president, Julius Nyerere, announced the Arusha Declaration—laying down socialist principles for his country—Merali was one of the thousands who joined the 400-mile walk from Moshi to Dar es Salaam to mark the occasion. It took 11 days.
“The reason I did it was not because I believed in Nyerere’s policy but because there was no other Asian doing it,” he says.
Shortly after the walk, he moved to Nairobi, where he completed high school in 1969. He then jetted off to Britain a year later, where he studied accounts and finance at a college on Oxford Street in London. In 1973, he came home to marry Zarina, a girl chosen by his mother.
Merali’s journey came with its fair share of tough lessons.
In 1999, investors from French company Vivendi were looking for a Kenyan partner to invest in what would be Kenya’s second mobile phone service provider. Forty percent was up for grabs. Though Merali had not dealt with GSM and mobile phone technology, he took the opportunity to invest money in a company called Kencell.
It took a turn for the worse due to internal problems at Vivendi and the 2001 terrorist attack on the World Trade Center towers in New York, which, forced the company to reconsider its strategy in Africa. Simply put, they wanted out.
“Every time an issue came up, either in New York or anywhere else, they would turn the heat on their African operations and I could see that they were doing their best to get rid of their African interests,” says Merali.
Vivendi was obligated to make Merali an offer first, owing to his pre-emptive rights as owner of the remaining 40% in the cellular service provider, Kencell. They gave him 15 days to raise $250 million to exercise his right. Almost certain that Merali would not pull it off, Vivendi went ahead with negotiations with South Africa’s MTN.
With the end of the 15 days nigh, Merali contacted an old friend Mohammed Ibrahim—founder of cellular services provider Celtel—about the 60% stake offer in Kencell. Celtel had tried, unsuccessfully, to enter the Kenyan market for four years and agreed to take up the 60% majority stake in Kencell at $250 million. In the meantime, Vivendi agreed to sell their stake at $230 million. The upshot was that Merali made $20 million profit in 24 hours.
“Always remember that the best time to buy is when foreign companies want to go, and the best time to sell is when they want to come. I celebrated later that evening because it was a great thing,” he says.
He later offloaded his stake in the cellular company, noting that he would not have made as much money had he waited longer.
“When I sold my 15 percent, I managed to create good wealth. In business, timing is key.”
When Merali sold 15%— worth an estimated Ksh6 billion—of his 20% stake to Kuwait-based Zain Group. He made more than $130 million on the sale, which he says never would have happened had he held on to the stake longer. Merali retained 5% ownership in Kenya’s second largest cellular service provider, after selling most of his stake to India’s Bharti, which took over from Zain Group. The company has changed hands four times, since it was established in Kenya, creating speculation about its profitability, but Merali maintains that he has never lost a cent through the company.
Immediately after the Kencell deal, Merali brought fiber optics into the country, through Kenya Data Networks (KDN). The company offers data services to corporates, internet service providers and telecommunication companies.
“Once I saw the use of information technology in Europe, I knew that it had to catch up in Africa, and data today is growing very fast. That’s how we have been shifting our investments,” he says.
Merali’s interest in information and communications technology includes a share in Altech Swift Global that offers retail services such as voice over internet protocol (VoIP). He sold his majority stakes in both KDN and Altech to Liquid Telecom, from the UK. From his telecommunication deals alone, Merali has made more than $500 million.
One might wonder if Merali has ever got his fingers burnt. He has and green fingers at that. Once, he invested in a flower farm, but lost more than Ksh50 million ($586,635) when he sold. The farm had started performing badly and Merali says that he would have lost much more had he chosen to hold on. He also partnered with a German investor to open a hotel, but when the German partner died, things went downhill and he had to abandon the business.
“The important thing is that you learn from it, it’s always a learning process,” says Merali.
In his dealings, the stability of a company’s management contributes hugely to his decision to take it up or not. He does not buy companies to run them, but to make money. And when it’s time to sell, he sells.
“Keep emotions out of business, save that only for your wife!’’ says Merali.
He adds that business partnership must be based on mutual interests.
“It’s not like in a marriage where you can part ways and give 50 percent and say ‘go’.”
Merali is not only a profit taker; he joins the likes of Manu Chandaria in philanthropic activities around the country. The Zarina and Naushad Merali Foundation gives between Ksh150 million ($1.75 million) to Ksh250 million ($2.92 million) every year to communities. One of the biggest donations made by the foundation, included Ksh100 million ($1.17 million) to the Kenyatta National Hospital to build a day care center.
Merali donated 30 acres of prime beach property, in the affluent coastal town of Malindi, to the Kenyan government to be used as a public beach. He reserved a piece of land in Nairobi to establish a sports club called Jaffery’s.
Merali plans to invest in Africa’s energy infrastructure. He has put Sameer at the helm of the company, saying that his son has a name to protect, which will ensure that he stays focused.
“The company has grown on reputation. Your word is your bond, it’s not even the agreements,” he says to his son, who comes in for an introduction.
Thirty-seven-year-old Sameer has a Master’s Degree in banking and finance, but little can prepare him for his father’s big shoes. He is already running some of the companies both as an executive and non-executive director.
“As you know right now, Africa and more so in East Africa is where all the opportunity is. In the last 10 years, we knew it and now everybody knows it. There is a lot of activity, just looking at how the country has changed in the last 10 years and what is there for the future. It’s exciting,” he says.
Merali is one of the millionaires to watch in 2013. His ability to buy and sell at the speed of light has earned him millions of dollars. You can be sure, in the time it has taken to read this article, the old fox has struck another deal.

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