Perhaps most famously, Route 128 and Silicon Valley in the United States developed around the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Stanford universities, while key European knowledge regions developed at the Sophia Antipolis high-tech park in Côte d’Azur, France, and the Leuven region in Belgium.
In Africa, however, it is a relatively new phenomenon. But some universities on the continent are working towards setting themselves up as catalysts of innovation and entrepreneurship. Notable mentions must go to the University of Nairobi and the American University in Cairo, but South Africa is leading the charge.
The likes of Stellenbosch University, the University of Cape Town (UCT) and University of the Witwatersrand (Wits) are focusing more than ever on equipping their students to be entrepreneurs, primarily in response to unemployment issues in the country. Almost 50% of those aged between 15 and 24 in South Africa are without a job, and some tertiary institutions are adapting by equipping them to become job creators.
<a href="http://www.forbesafrica.com/30-under-30/2018/06/04/under-30-technology/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">READ MORE: Forbes Africa Under 30 Technology Entrepreneurs</a>
Bakang Moetse is Impact Investing Project Manager at the Bertha Centre, a dedicated entrepreneurial unit within the Graduate School of Business at UCT. She says high youth unemployment had made the promotion of entrepreneurship an imperative for many African governments.
“Whilst government may be responsible for creating an enabling environment for the development of businesses, universities play a key role in delivering skills and expertise, as well as creating enabling environments for incubation of entrepreneurs,” says Moetse.
Universities also stand to gain. At a time when the relevance of university degrees has come into question due to the number of unemployed graduates and lack of employment readiness of those graduates who do enter the workforce, promoting entrepreneurship provides a way of ensuring universities continue to be recognized as key to the development of societies and economies.
“For universities interested in taking on a more active role in this regard, there is a competitive advantage to be gained in becoming leaders within this field of research, which can further bolster their credentials,” says Moetse.
Stellenbosch University runs its own incubator – LaunchLab – and also invests in some student-run tech startups. Head of Incubation Brandon Paschal says universities that do so will produce more employable and resilient graduates, and their reputations will grow as such.
“Also, with the current student fee climate, if universities are not backing and pursuing commercializing university technology, their financial sustainability and broader access to tertiary education is in jeopardy,” he says.
So how have startups incubated by universities benefitted? G-J van Rooyen was an associate professor at Stellenbosch, and launched his bitcoin-based anti-piracy startup Custos Media Technologies out of LaunchLab. He says it had been a great space from which to grow an early-stage company.
“At a startup, you&#8217;re constantly juggling concerns and issues. Being in a supportive environment where space and facilities are one less thing to worry about makes a huge difference,” Van Rooyen says. “Since LaunchLab is a hub for startups and investors, it directly impacted our fundraising efforts, and introduced us to our angel investor.”
<img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="aligncenter wp-image-36756 size-large" src="https://www.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/edit-launchlab-12-of-94-1024x679.jpg" alt="" width="1024" height="679" srcset="https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/edit-launchlab-12-of-94-1024x679.jpg 1024w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/edit-launchlab-12-of-94-300x199.jpg 300w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/edit-launchlab-12-of-94-600x398.jpg 600w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/edit-launchlab-12-of-94-768x509.jpg 768w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/edit-launchlab-12-of-94.jpg 2048w" sizes="(max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px" />
Michael-John Dippenaar’s on-demand storage space startup Sxuirrel first encountered LaunchLab after winning a competition run by the incubator, earning funding and support.
“Amongst other intangibles thereafter, and in the period leading up to then and now, we gained help in the form of advice, community and networks,” Dippenaar says.
“We had support in finding lawyers, connecting to additional entrepreneurs to learn from, and access to soft-skill building resources.”
<a href="http://www.forbesafrica.com/focus/2018/06/05/investment-marketplace-coming-to-africa/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">READ MORE: Investment Marketplace Coming To Africa</a>
Training students – and professors – in entrepreneurial skills and providing them a safe space from which to launch their ideas in one thing, but universities also need to ensure they have solid links with corporates and funders to help incubated startups scale. This can be a challenge.
However, Tine Fisker Henriksen, Senior Project Manager, Innovative Finance, at Bertha Centre, says the credibility associated with university brands lends itself to bringing in new partnerships and streams of funding entrepreneurs on their own would not be able to tap into.
“We are seeing increased interest from the corporate sector to get involved in supporting entrepreneurship, and we have managed to establish partnerships that have been valuable in this regard,” she says.
“From our point of view, there is great potential to expand this beyond mere sponsorship of events and once-off fundraising, as is commonly the case, and move in the direction of more sustainable partnerships approaches for rising entrepreneurs.”
The initiatives at places like Stellenbosch and UCT are well developed, with a track record of helping startups launch and raise funding for their next stage of development, but are enough universities following their lead?
Paschal says there is some evidence of this, but it takes time to transform very traditional and conservative institutions. Part of the challenge is that “startup skills” are intangible, EQ-related things that you cannot learn in a classroom.
“The push for universities spinning out companies, and supporting startups and SMEs, is disrupting the traditional role of universities. The trend is going in this direction, but generally universities are battling to get beyond the academic side,” he says.
Henriksen agrees more needs to be done.
“We have seen the top universities develop more entrepreneurial courses, hubs and initiatives. But there is definitely room for greater involvement, and coordination of efforts in this space to create a synergized impact,” she says.
&#8211; Tom Jackson

BANNER-LaunchLab-12-of-67

Africa’s New Silicon Valleys

It happened one Saturday afternoon; the meat was on the fire, the smoke was in the air, and a father sat his 13-year-old son down for a paternal chat that was to change his life.
The father was billionaire investor Jannie Mouton – known as the &#8216;Boere Buffett&#8217;. The son was Piet Mouton who was to grow up into a multi-million-dollar investor. Billionaire and son have beefed up PSG, the investment holding company worth $4.3 billion (market cap) that has spread to a combined market capitalization of approximately $12.5 billion in just 22 years.
&#8220;Growing up in our family, at the age of 13 I already knew what options and futures were… It was a new thing on the JSE and my dad came home and, at a braai on a Saturday, he sat me and my brother down and explained it to us. So here I had some great knowledge that I didn&#8217;t know what to do with at school, but I understood the concept of options and futures,&#8221; says Piet.
&#8220;[PSG] was part of our life growing up, the entire business concept. Being mathematically inclined, [my future idea] wasn&#8217;t necessarily to go into business with my father, but it was to go into business.&#8221;
This was the incredible inside story told from the two men as FORBES AFRICA sat down at 35 Church Street, Stellenbosch, in the heart of the quaint South African wine farm to hear how one family built an investment giant.
&#8220;My wife once told me that was your favorite child, PSG, you never ask anything about Jan or Piet, or Charity. It’s only PSG, PSG. The whole braai [barbeque], the whole evening was talking about PSG. It was very much part and parcel of how we started,&#8221; says Jannie.
The choice of the building in Church Street for this interview was a spot-on smart investment.  They call it Ou Kollege and it is as much of a reflection of their humble characters as their life stories. The wooden panels, grey walls, African paintings and sculptures of leopards have that millionaire touch. Jannie bought it with his old friend GT Ferreira, FirstRand founder and also a multimillionaire. The two men decorated it with paint pot and brush in hand.
&#8220;We bought this building and we haven&#8217;t left.  I remember GT saying to me &#8216;Jannie, it&#8217;s just a structure, you must put stuff in it as well&#8217;, so he ended up being the interior decorator here as well,&#8221; says Jannie.
&#8220;You can see this wood paneling is the same as GT&#8217;s office on the third floor which looks very similar to what we&#8217;ve got. It had the same interior decorator at the end of the day,&#8221; says Piet, as they both laugh.
<a href="http://www.forbesafrica.com/cover-story/2017/02/01/africas-billionaires/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Africa&#8217;s Billionaires</a>
On this day, in the very room where they plotted billions of dollars of investment around the world, Piet and Jannie don matching black suits and white shirts. They are every inch the shrewd businessmen, with a dash of down-to-earth humility.
Thomas Edison, the man famous for the lightbulb, once said opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work. The Moutons are dressed in suits and look like investment.
Jannie founded the group just 22 years ago after a kick in the gut. He was fired by his partners from his own stock broking firm. To add insult to injury, his name as part of Senekal, Mouton &amp; Kitshoff was on the door. The fact that Mouton will never forget August 5, 1995, shows how deeply it hurt him. At the time, probably the last thing on his mind was that this humiliation was the best thing that ever happened to him.
<div id="attachment_32675" style="width: 270px" class="wp-caption alignleft"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-32675" class=" wp-image-32675" src="http://www.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/IMG_2492.LR_-200x300.jpg" alt="" width="260" height="390" />Jannie Mouton (Photo by Jay Caboz)</div>
<blockquote>&#8220;If you were fired in your life, you must have realized you&#8217;ve made a mistake. I think it was a good lesson. It&#8217;s a team effort and all the team must be happy and must respect their standing credibility and wisdom. I&#8217;ve learned a lot about that,&#8221; says Jannie.</blockquote>
That lesson hit like a sledgehammer when young Piet was told the news.
&#8220;I was in first-year and was 19 years old. The first part started with Jannie being fired. He was so ashamed he got my mother to phone us up and say he&#8217;d resigned,&#8221; says Piet.
Jannie searched his soul and vowed to own a financial services JSE-listed company. It took three months to get onto the JSE. Jannie, then 48 years old, bought a 51% share of JSE-listed PAG for R3.5 million ($273,000). He sold it two years later for R107 million ($8.35 million).
Then he went home. He settled in Stellenbosch, the town where he studied alongside fellow decorator GT, in the Western Cape.
From these humble beginnings the PSG Group took off like a rocket with annual compound growth in earnings of 50.8% a year.
Their main investments are in bank start-up Capitec, private education firm Curro Holdings, PSG Konsult and agribusiness firm Zeder – with the 31% interest in Capitec constituting roughly 40% of the value of PSG&#8217;s portfolio.
Here&#8217;s how rapidly PSG has grown: An investment of R100,000 ($78,000), on its first day in business, would be worth approximately R390 million ($30.5 million) today if all dividends were reinvested. No other company in the world matches this, according to the Moutons and researchers at the Top Performing Companies &amp; Public Sector.
Jannie is Afrikaans with a capital A. When you speak to him you can see he thinks in Afrikaans and speaks in English. Yet when it comes to business he knows, whenever he speaks, English is king. So when it came to sending his sons to school he bent the rules to claim he was English-speaking so they could grow up learning the world language.
&#8220;My wife was a bit smarter than me. She was in an English school her whole life at Rustenburg Girls’ High. She realized how important English was in life and in business… To send your children from an Afrikaans background to an English school, you had to apply officially. Otherwise they wouldn&#8217;t do it. I still have the little document that says I am English-speaking. That was to protect Afrikaans, they didn&#8217;t want Afrikaans schools and English schools to mix.&#8221;
With parental guidance, and the English language, Piet took to business like a duck to water in his first year at Stellenbosch University where he studied actuarial science.
&#8220;Remember, this was at a time when we were coming into a new democracy. We were at university, there was massive growth in the PSG share price, I think it went up from 36c and peaked at about R18 which was my last year at university. Students do take interest in what happens in the world and it&#8217;s a phenomenal story, so everybody knew who Jannie was, and obviously Jannie and GT were Simonsberg Old Boys, which was the residence where I went to,&#8221; says Piet.
With seven years as CEO of PSG, Piet is the new generation injecting adrenalin into the beating heart of this $4.3-billion company. There were no short cuts for the young Piet, according to Jannie, he had to work his way up the corporate ladder.
<div id="attachment_32676" style="width: 266px" class="wp-caption alignleft"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-32676" class=" wp-image-32676" src="http://www.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/IMG_2503.LR_-200x300.jpg" alt="" width="256" height="384" />Piet Mouton (Photo by Jay Caboz)</div>
&#8220;Piet had started in the group in 2004 with a company called Arch Equity. It was actually a tough day in our lives, because his mother and my wife passed away on 11th of May. On the 17th we launched Arch Equity. We never discussed him becoming CEO,&#8221; says Jannie.
&#8220;Piet was a candidate and I stood back. His colleagues selected him. Here, in private and in public, Piet was the best candidate, I couldn&#8217;t get involved. I would never do that in my life, misuse my title and it was the shareholders decision to appoint him head of the board… For us, it&#8217;s the best CEO who must be in charge.&#8221;
Despite this, you can only imagine the pressure that Piet feels. Not only does he juggle billions in other people&#8217;s money, the chairperson is also your father, the person who started to build it.
&#8220;[Jannie&#8217;s] entire business philosophy is a lesson. The biggest one is don&#8217;t give me problems, give me solutions. Jannie always says &#8216;it&#8217;s easier to tell a guy something won&#8217;t work, it&#8217;s a lot more difficult to sit with an idea and think of a way of doing it differently&#8217;,&#8221; says Piet.
A cornerstone of PSG&#8217;s success is a 30.7% stake in Capitec Bank. In 2002, Capitec’s individual shares listings were worth less than a rand and now they are worth R531 ($41.50). The guiding spirit of Capitec is Michiel le Roux, who disrupted South Africa&#8217;s once cozy banking market by bringing in an aggressive strategy in search of deposits from low-income earners.
<blockquote>&#8220;The Moutons, as the main drivers behind PSG, have built a company that created wealth for many. Their active involvement in the beginning years to get the Capitec dream off the ground was crucial to our success,” says Le Roux.</blockquote>
Capitec was built on 300 micro-lending branches. It shook up the banking sector with new ideas, like the no-brainer of opening on Sundays.
&#8220;The five big banks, prior to Capitec, sat back and they had a nice little oligopoly. Capitec came around and they were allowed to build a great business. By the time the competition realized this is a real player, it was too late. Now Capitec is a serious competitor,&#8221; says Piet.
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PSG has proven time and again that opportunities can be found in the pessimism of others. These are tough times for South Africa, one of Africa&#8217;s most developed economies. It has suffered a string of downgrades, political uncertainty and questions about corruption and fiscal mismanagement.
&#8220;Everybody is always outwardly focused in South Africa… But it means you can actually operate in a very uncompetitive environment. You would not have been able to start a Capitec in London,&#8221; says Piet.
Now technology is also a factor.
&#8220;Each and every week, we at PSG level encourage our subsidiaries to look at the changes. It&#8217;s a fact of life. From the start [Capitec] was a bit of an IT business but now it&#8217;s becoming more and more an IT business. Just look back 10 years; it&#8217;s unbelievable how business has changed. I&#8217;ve also realized my generation has to step back, because we don&#8217;t keep pace with this generation,&#8221; says Jannie.
&#8220;It&#8217;s going to continue changing in the years ahead. It&#8217;s a big thing at all the companies at the moment. You have to sit down and look at your business model and say ‘can it be interrupted?’ There are businesses that are just not there, take for example Kodak,&#8221; says Piet.
&#8220;Now you sit at the Capitec level and you say we mustn&#8217;t be caught with our pants down, because there are guys sitting in garages developing FinTech stuff. At least we at Capitec acknowledge – we don&#8217;t know where the problem is going to come from, we&#8217;ve got to constantly be smart about it,&#8221; says Piet.
&#8220;There are 150 people working on innovation and it’s costing us R200 million ($15.6 million) a year, to constantly scan and see if we can implement some of this new innovation.&#8221;
A recent purchase of an online lender in Poland is a Capitec move toward technology.
&#8220;The model is slightly different here. Whereas here in South Africa we are backed by bricks and mortar with 800 branches with a massive 300 ATM network, there it will be an online operation. Michiel coined a great phrase, shortly after I came back from the UK: it was either going to be a small failure or a big success. Now, where a lot of corporates go overseas and make massive acquisitions and then try implement them, Capitec actually tackled a very small business that has the potential to expand and they can contribute capital if it grows… It&#8217;s a longer path but it&#8217;s a sure way of hitting success at the end of the day. If it&#8217;s a failure it&#8217;s a small failure,&#8221; says Piet.
Another of PSG&#8217;s success stories is Chris van der Merwe&#8217;s Curro Holdings that develops, acquires and manages private schools in South Africa. What started off as a school of 28 learners in the hall of a church in Durbanville, Cape Town, now has a market cap of $1.4 billion.
&#8220;Chris van der Merwe is a unique person. Education and doing something great for the company is his passion. He tells you to your face he doesn&#8217;t understand accounts or profits. He is one of the people I admire in life, he isn&#8217;t fanatically orientated but he has a big thing about education,&#8221; says Jannie.
&#8220;Chris was a primary school teacher who knew he was also phenomenal businessman. He built the school himself, with his own hands. He took his early pension, started with 28 kids in a class, now it&#8217;s up to 50,000,&#8221; says Piet.
In May, Curro Holdings announced it would buy the South African School of Motion Picture Medium and Live Performance (AFDA) – a film, television and live performance higher education institution. Step one of an expansion into the tertiary education system under the soon-to-be JSE-listed company Stadio. In six years, the share price has increased more than 300% to R44.70, with pupil numbers rising 14% to 47,589 in 2016, reports CNBC AFRICA.
&#8220;A typical school class has about 45 students. At varsity, a class could be 100, and the fees are even a bit more than school. It could be a fantastic model,&#8221; says Jannie.
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Asked if this decision had any particular influence from recent education crisis events, like FeesMustFall, the campaign that saw South African universities come to a standstill amid violence over tuition fees, the Moutons were open.
&#8220;See, there you have almost hit the nail on the head of investments. Big macro themes, if you can get it right, you shouldn&#8217;t be limited to growth. Take the whole education sector as a whole, primary and core, if you can get it right, there is actually a massive scope for growth. You are right about the FeesMustFall, because people are becoming disillusioned [with education].&#8221;
Another company Jannie believes could surprise investors is PSG Konsult. With 270 branches and 800 advisors, each branch is its own company, 70%-owned by the individuals who run it – what Jannie calls ultimate empowerment.
&#8220;You should attract very good people alongside you and you must make them co-workers inside the business. You must trust them implicitly and give them the space to grow. That has worked significantly for our group, because they act like shareholders and look after the company,&#8221; says Piet.
Back in the boardroom, the conversation shifts toward the lighter side of life, something the pair can&#8217;t agree on – rugby.
&#8220;It&#8217;s one of the points we don&#8217;t see eye to eye on. Jannie is a Stormers supporter whereas I am a strong Lions supporter. Literally, Saturdays would be a fight to behold.&#8221;
Imagine if the idea to invest in the Stormers or Lions was raised in this Stellenbosch boardroom.

One Name, Two Investors, $4 Billion

On this Thursday afternoon, in Stellenbosch, a small university town, east of Cape Town, the sky is blue and the air crisp. In the gentle light, dressed in khaki pants and a checkered blue shirt, he doesn’t look much like a multimillionaire but Michiel le Roux has done for banking what Bill Gates did for software and Muhammad Ali for boxing. He has created a bank that in 15 years has forced its way into the top five in South Africa. He wears his $530-million net worth lightly, but behind the smile and humility, is a hint of power with a firm handshake that means business.
“We said let’s build a bank and we were not going to experiment on a small scale, we always stayed very close to our clients and we knew what we wanted to bring to the industry,” says Le Roux.
About a decade ago, few deposited their salaries into Capitec, most had never heard of it. Today, Capitec has over 7.3 million active clients, 720 branches, 11,440 employees and holds R13.7 billion ($1 billion) in shareholders’ funds. For Capitec, simplicity is everything.
<img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="alignleft size-medium wp-image-5187" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/Michiel-Le-Roux_JC-3-200x300.jpg" alt="" width="200" height="300" />
“When I was young, everyone was a Sir in the corporate industry and I hated it. There is a woman here who used to serve tea when we started and she couldn’t get herself to call me Michiel so she called me Mr Michiel,” he laughs.
“Here, there is no distinction between people. Nobody flies business class. How you fly, where you stay, the rental car you drive is the same whether you are the CEO or the junior in the company. Everyone gets the same treatment.”
There is a business reason for this.
“After the army, I worked at a company I thought was a very smart company but there was too much hierarchy. I found it very awkward and terrible. [Imagine] you have meetings out of town and you wait for your flight with your colleagues and you chat while you wait; then in the plane you sit in front and they all pass you to go sit at the back. I find it very stupid. The natural thing is to continue talking,” he says.
At Capitec, they take simple seriously. No suits, the CEO’s office is the same size as everyone else’s, the CEO shares a personal assistant, no personalized parking spots, even the guard at the gate calls him Michiel, while the receptionist jokes freely about his sense of style — or lack thereof.
This simplicity and business acumen has made Le Roux a rich man; the 38th richest in Africa to be exact, according to FORBES. In just 15 years, this fortune has grown rapidly. It has nearly doubled from around $290 million in 2011.
Capitec had big friends early on, on the other side of Stellenbosch. One of the earliest and biggest was PSG Group, an investment holding company, owned by former FORBES AFRICA cover, Jannie Mouton, who is worth $970 million. One day PSG called Le Roux to listen to what they had to say; he believes this was an attempt to lure him into its micro-lending business.
“I said I am not interested, this is not the type of business I want to be involved in because it’s a terrible business; they charge exorbitant interest rates. Those were the old pin and card days. When you wanted a cash loan, they would take your card and your pin number and they would withdraw whatever you owed and then give the card back to you. It sounded, and still sounds, terrible,” says Le Roux.
PSG convinced him to visit their branches and he was fascinated by how the micro-lending company treated its clients. According to Le Roux, in banking, the lower income consumers in South Africa were poorly treated, but not by PSG.
“A bank always determines the value of the client based on their net worth which to this stage in my mind doesn’t make sense because a guy with high net worth might be very frugal with the use of his credit card whereas a guy with a much lower net worth might be exorbitant with his credit card use. The guy that is exorbitant should be much higher in the rankings but banks don’t look at it that way.”
“If you are a factory worker and earn very little, they were not that interested in you and that to me was a failure on banks not accommodating the lower income people,” he says.
In this, Le Roux saw a gap. He was bored at work and he decided to build a bank that would right these wrongs. He joined forces with PSG Group.
Before the bank was called Capitec, it was called Daxacom.
“We had about three branches that we put up and put on the logos and when we looked at it, it didn’t work. We had many other names but I am ashamed to say them,” he chuckles.
Le Roux says it took a long time to find the right name because they didn’t want a name that reflected they specialized in servicing lower income groups.
“We didn’t want to call it people’s bank for example, if anything, we wanted something that sounds modern and as if it could have been an electronic bank only, although we are also a physical bank.”
<img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="alignleft size-medium wp-image-5188" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/Michiel-Le-Roux_JC-12-300x200.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="200" />
Capitec won. The next problems were timing, licensing and money.
According to Le Roux, there was a small banks crisis just before they opened. Timing was not of the essence.
“In the late 90s, South Africa granted a number of new banking licenses and as far as I know, that was the last time they granted new banking licences. Most of those banks folded quickly. A bank called The Business Bank, which was about three to four years old, folded and PSG took them over and we sort of bought the license through taking over a failed bank. If it wasn’t for that, I don’t know if we could ever have got a license,” he says.
As Capitec was about to launch, Saambou Bank, one of South Africa’s significant players in the industry, went bankrupt. It was a very public collapse that did the image of banking no good at all. Lines of people appeared on TV news desperate to get their money out.
“The Reserve Bank closed them on a Saturday to minimize the impact on the markets and we listed Capitec Bank Holdings Ltd on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange on Monday, 18 February, 2002, the week later. That was a terrible time to list a bank and it also meant it was a terrible time to get finance whatsoever. I know I sound like an old man saying you learn from your mistakes but it’s true. Starting a business in good times is always very dangerous because you will think business is easy when the wind is blowing from behind and the sailing is smooth. When you start with wind blowing from ahead, then you know business is tough and you grow,” says Le Roux.
To survive when others failed wasn’t easy.
“It’s a hard slog to create the infrastructure, to network, to decide what you want to do. We take pride in the fact that at that stage, when we were also starting, Old Mutual had a retail banking license and they wanted to start a retail bank. They were looking for systems when we were looking for systems and the rumour mill had that they paid out R800 million ($60 million) for their system and that was when the rand was about R4 to the dollar but they never opened that bank because they couldn’t make it work.”
Capitec kept it cheap and simple.
“Other banks use systems that are designed for them which means that they have to maintain that; when the coders that wrote that leave, you are left with a gap. We made right calls because we had a good management team and we had a good management team because we hired the right people when we started. We don’t spend where there is no need,” he says.
Persistence and good planning helped them survive.
“We have been creating new branches but we try to be creative in the way we do that, we don’t over invest in a branch, we don’t build a branch, we don’t have specialized buildings and we don’t own a single branch, we lease all of them so we have the ability to cut back in future if things change.”
Although they want everything to be digital, they want to keep branches open for their clients.
“Our clients like the one-on-one interaction. In January, 6.7 million people came into the branches. It means, on average, our clients visit a branch at least once a month. Most importantly everything should be done on mobile. We suspect that is the future of banking but we are not quite sure what it’s going to be,” says Le Roux.
While other banks turn a blind eye to South Africa’s “unbanked” or “unbankable”, Capitec has made these customers their market. Over time, Capitec slowly transformed its micro-lending clients, who mainly relied on it for loans, into transactional banking clients who deposit their salaries and manage their transactions through their Capitec accounts.
International banking advisory group Lafferty has ranked Capitec Bank as the best bank in the world in its inaugural 2016 Bank Quality Rankings. According to the report’s findings, Capitec came out on top, with the only five-star rating out of the 100 banking groups listed. In South Africa, Barclays comes second with four stars, while Nedbank, Standard Bank and First Rand have three stars. Lafferty uses a combination of financial and non-financial disclosures in the latest annual reports to determine the quality of the organizations and their respective business models.
“South Africa’s Capitec was the only bank to achieve five stars. The bank has a level of focus, geographically and strategically, which boosted its scores across all of the metrics in the ratings process,” says the report.
Capitec is giving South Africa’s banking industry a run for its money. Michael Lafferty, Chairman at Lafferty Group, says it’s because its founders understand their customers’ needs and they developed an innovative strategy and business model aimed at addressing those needs better than the established players. He says the best quality banks in the world are found in South Africa.
“Capitec is doing well because of its focus on the consumer&#8230; We only found two or three banks in Europe that were near to the top quality rating we saw and only one in the United States. There is something remarkable about South African banks,” says Lafferty.
That focus on the consumer is also visible in Capitec’s decision to open on Sundays. In 2011, according to reports, Capitec’s marketing and corporate affairs executive, Carl Fischer, said the idea has always been to operate like a retailer as a lot of people went to malls over the weekends.
Many people sing the praises of Capitec. But, says Le Roux, you can ignore your competition in other industries, but not in banking.
“If you bank with Standard Bank and I convince your friend to open an account with Capitec and you want to pay money to your friend, your bank must be prepared to pay money to Capitec. If you use a Capitec card and you are in a restaurant and they have a Nedbank machine they must cooperate. We all have to be in agreement and work together.”
Banking is a tough industry. Capitec’s closest rival, African Bank, collapsed in August 2014 as bad debt soared and the lender failed to increase provisions.
“When African Bank went bankrupt, it was terrifying. We thought African Bank were over optimistic with their credit assessments but we thought they were a big strong company. When they closed their doors it practically felt like a funeral. If they can sink, anyone can sink,” says Le Roux.
Capitec however was much more conservative. They set aside cash to cover bad debts and stuck to strict budgets.
The globally-awarded retail bank increased its active client numbers by 1.03 million, to a total of 7.3 million for the year to 29 February, 2016. This bolstered headline earnings to R3.2 billion ($234 million) for the financial year ended February 2016, up 26% on the previous year. Net transaction fee income increased by 16% to R3 billion ($220 million), the value of credit advanced increased by 25% year on year to R24.2 billion ($1.7 billion) for the 2015/16 financial year.
Capitec Bank CEO, Gerrie Fourie, on its website, says the brand acceptance continues to grow substantially in the market and there has been a 26% growth in total retail deposits to R37.8 billion ($2.7 billion).
“We are excited about the continued growth in client numbers and in particular the higher income clients who are finding our offer the best value in the market, which is an important consideration for consumers in the current economic climate,” says Fourie.
As rivals hobbled through two banking crises, Capitec sailed through. The advantage, says Le Roux, is that they thought big from the beginning.
For Le Roux, confidence in yourself and the belief that you can achieve something is the starting point and not money. He says many young potential entrepreneurs see the lack of money as an excuse.
“Money is a valid problem but the bigger problem is management and getting the right people to do the job. We started, knowing it was going to be a difficult journey. At one stage during the founding phases, we reduced the rates we charged for loans by about 40 percent. That meant we had to do 40 percent more loans to break even. To do 40 percent more loans, you need 40 percent more capital and it took about four months before we came to that point where we had 40 percent. In the first month, we made a loss, and in the second, we ran out of money. We had to put our own cash into the company but we knew that if the boat doesn’t turn next month, we won’t have any more cash,” he says.
They also had Riaan Stassen; Capitec’s pioneering CEO from 2004 to 2013. Stassen has been friends with Le Roux for years and served as the Managing Director of Boland PKS from 1997 to 2000, a division of BoE Bank Limited.
“Riaan is a very smart guy. I believe he built Capitec Bank. If I may claim some role, I would claim that I had a dream of creating a bank and Riaan made that a reality. He actually made a different reality. My vision was that we should be a bank for low income people, for instance, to my shame, I must admit that at that stage I said we should have books. Riaan laughed and said ‘you are crazy; we are in the electronic age’. He said ‘we are going to build an electronic bank for the new age and not for low income people but for everyone’ and that’s what we have done.”
As a travel enthusiast, Le Roux wanted to take Capitec across Africa, but, he says the longer they are in business, the more the dream recedes. Emerging market countries such as Brazil, Chile, Turkey or Poland are preferred.
“We don’t think Africa is a natural habitat for Capitec Bank, we are based on a digital financial environment, our client base are more salaried people and if we go into [for example] Zambia only 10 percent of the population earn a decent salary  and most of the people are [in the informal sector]. Even Nigeria is a tough country, it’s not like they have a massive urban digital employed population. We could do business there but we will have to redesign our products,” says Le Roux.
As we leave, the fiery red ball is dipping towards the mountain. This sun may be setting but it seems Capitec is just rising.

‘A Terrible Time To List A Bank’

Alonely dirt road leads to a rustic farmhouse with old-fashioned shutters, wooden beams and creeping vines. By the entrance are a few ageing oak barrels, still sturdy and red from years of storing wine.
It is a fitting prelude to the man you are about to meet.
We are at Vriesenhof, a farm nestled between the Stellenbosch and Helderberg mountains in the Paradyskloof Valley of South Africa’s Western Cape. These winelands are rife with grapes and gossip, and boast a colorful cast of characters, mostly wine farmers who relate the valley’s stories, and often are stories themselves.
This is a world where wine and winning are spoken of in the same breath.
And in this cavernous house, a remodeled 18th century cellar, Jan Boland Coetzee, the renowned Springbok rugby player and venerable vintner, exemplifies both.
Within seconds of meeting him on this impromptu visit, Coetzee shows he is a true son of the soil. It is a warm April. Barefoot and brisk, in beige shorts, he darts from the living room, to the kitchen, to the backyard – where his elder daughter Hanle, who lives close by, is earnestly laying out tables for an evening do at the house.
In the kitchen – shelves laden with wine bottles – there are sizzling sounds on the stove, followed by the aroma of – possibly – deep-fried fish cakes. Coetzee is issuing instructions to a few laborers at the back. He soon returns to sit at the large yellowwood dining table, decked with flowers in vases set like a Vincent van Gogh painting.
Originally Dutch, Coetzee says his ancestors came to the Cape in 1679. It is here, in this valley at the foot of the Stellenbosch mountains, that he learned the game of rugby and the art of making wine.
Coetzee purchased Vriesenhof in 1980 – “for its south-facing slopes on the cooler side of the foothills” – and has been here since, cultivating plantings of cabernet sauvignon, cabernet franc, merlot, pinotage and pinot noir, sold under the labels of Vriesenhof and Paradyskloof.
“I love to take pride in what is ours, what is South African,” says the valley’s doyen of pinotage.
<img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="alignleft size-medium wp-image-4031" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/Teddy-Leung-Shutterstock.com-002-300x200.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="200" />
“I focused on pinotage when I was young, as it is the only grape variety since its birth that has really taken on a commercial collective in the world of wine. And if it is doing well, it means we are proud of it, because it is born under the African sun, it is performing under the African sun, and we take pride because we believe it is ours.”
Coetzee pauses between words and sentences, but when he speaks, he makes you feel the earth around you: the air, the sun, the soil. Clearly, it is his territory – and terroir.
“Wine is a mirror of the environment first and foremost, because it is a product of the soil. In that, lies our future. Man needs to understand the soil, the plant, to put it in its right place in the right environment to give it its best. And the more you care, the better it gets,” he says.
The man has a deep love for the farm, and is happy just to be in it – with his glass of chardonnay.
“I love what I am doing, I love the farm, and I love drinking good wine. It’s as simple as that,” says the sprightly 70-year-old whose days on the 85-hectare farm begin at 4AM.
Coetzee studied oenology and viticulture at Stellenbosch University.
“I didn’t become a vet so I became a viticulturist. It’s amazing how many winemakers wanted to become vets,”
he laughs.
“I still have the record for writing the most exams before I passed. So I have a very broad knowledge. Like the wooden barrel, it’s [like] the un-opening of old wine.”
While still a student, Coetzee became captain of the university’s Under-18 rugby team.
“Everyone in South Africa plays rugby from a young age,” he says.
He played for his provincial team, Western Province, from 1967 to 1979, and played flank for the national team, the Springboks, from 1974 to 1976.
He stopped playing when a tour was cancelled in 1979 on account of apartheid when South African sport also took a hit.
“From a South Africa point of view, things were bad in terms of international rugby because of apartheid. We were isolated… When the tour was cancelled, I stopped playing and went to France in 1981 to work in a wine house in Burgundy for a year,” says Coetzee.
That was the tipping point. He returned wiser, and helped lift the profile of wine in Stellenbosch. Today, he sells his wine all over the world; Scandinavia is his biggest market.
Coetzee may have stopped playing rugby, but he uses it well in his wine analogies.
“We used to export 74 percent of our crop, but now try and get as close as possible. We do 50:50 local and export. Rugby has taught me to have two legs. If you kick [with] one leg, one can hopefully stand on the other,” he says.
<img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="alignleft size-medium wp-image-4030" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/Fingerhut-Shutterstock.com_-300x200.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="200" />
Coetzee vividly remembers that tear-jerking moment when Nelson Mandela handed the trophy to Springbok captain François Pienaar during the 1995 World Cup final. Coetzee was present, as a spectator.
“It was a special day, not only for sport but also for mankind. I remember that moment clearly. I can still see it.”
Coetzee has ensured his legacy – in both rugby and wine – lives on.
“My grandsons [between the ages of five to 10] all play rugby. They also made their first wine in 2015. Each of them has a barrel from the vintage of the year they were born in,” says Coetzee.
Divorced, Coetzee lives by himself. Fortunately, his four children are all into farming in some way, and visit frequently. His daughter Hanle says the most remarkable thing about her father is his humility.
“He has 40 years plus of experience of harvests and climates in the wine industry. He has seen good vintages, and bad. The new, younger winemakers are well-traveled, whereas in his time, the exposure and material were limited. He has old-world knowledge. If he drops dead tomorrow, it’s all gone, I don’t know how to capture it,” she says.
How much is he worth? Coetzee thinks long and hard, before answering: “I actually can’t put a number to it; we are not [into] numbers. We want to be loving and caring people, and that you can’t measure in currency. Money is an evil necessity. I am a big believer of the barter system – milk farmers and cheese farmers must drink wine, and I must eat cheese. They must produce meat, and they must drink wine. I try to convince all my farming colleagues in the mutton, beef, cheese, fish and lobster businesses to [barter].”
And are they listening? For sure, he says with certainty.
Coetzee has many admirers in the valley, across generations. About three kilometers from his Vriesenhof farmhouse, at the Kleine Zalze estate, its owner Kobus Basson, another Stellenbosch success, says Coetzee was instrumental in exposing him to the lifestyle around the wine business. He turned the rugby-playing lawyer into one of the region’s top wine farmers.
“Jan Coetzee is one of the characters of Stellenbosch, you can’t tell a wine story without him,” says the 57-year-old Basson of the senior entrepreneur.
“He is the type of guy [who] if there is snow in the mountains, would still walk in his short pants, with muscles like he has. He is a Stellenbosch legend, one of the five wine personalities that built this industry.”
Basson’s father was a figurehead in the local rugby club and that was his first connection with Coetzee. Plus, Basson’s initial 10-year legal practice ensured he interacted with most of the wine farmers.
“When you work with them, it’s like a friendship. Jan was the guy who spent a lot of time in France, and knew all the wine areas well. In 1996, I went with him and a few other prominent guys – while I was still a legal guy – on a trip to Argentina, and that gave me a completely different perspective of the industry. They were much ahead of us.”
Basson says South Africa’s wine industry matured only in the last 20 years. After he finished his law degree at Stellenbosch University, Basson took a year off to go to central Europe to be a rugby coach.
“I went there to play and coach and work on relationships, in what they called the European B-League rugby countries. It actually exposed me to other things – to wine, food and the lifestyle around it… I understood how the Germans, Dutch and French work in a different way with wine… I immediately got this idea about lifestyle and food and wine combinations.”
Returning to Stellenbosch, he practiced as a lawyer, and got into the wine business more by default than design.
“My wife came from a wine family, and told me she wanted to live on a farm. I said ‘forget it, I am not farming’. Eventually, in 1996, her brother was running the family farm, and was looking for an opportunity with a winery, and I told him about Kleine Zalze [that I had heard] was on the market. He asked me for money to pay the deposit, and that’s how I got involved. He said ‘in the meantime, you can have 50 percent share of it’, and before I realized, I was sucked into it, because this is a business that sucks in money, in terms of capital investment.”
They bought the 40-hectare farm and after the first harvest, signed up with importers from Britain, who had high expectations.
“I thought, ‘either you do it properly or bail out’. In retrospect, I can see how the year in Germany helped, how my friendship with Jan Coetzee formed me,” says Basson.
During the nineties in South Africa, golf and wine tourism was just starting, so he thought: “Why do we go to Tuscany and Provence, when we actually have everything here? Why can’t we create it here?”
It was hard work. Every day, for a decade, Basson woke up at 3AM.
“I had no choice. It was crazy and difficult years, the interest rates went up between 1998 and 2002. I had to invest my shares and everything I had. Cash flow was the challenge during those years; we had to slowly and steadily build this up.”
Today, Kleine Zalze is 280 hectares, including the wine estate, an 18-hole golf course, a 47-bedroom lodge and the award-winning Terroir restaurant with chef Michael Broughton. Basson says all the businesses are doing very well.
“We are doing well in terms of exports [too]; I would say we do more than 200,000 cases of Kleine Zalze wines a year. And we have won several awards,” he says.
Chenin blanc is the brand’s specialty.
The last season for wine tourism in Stellenbosch was wonderful, adds Basson, who is also a director of the Stellenbosch Wine Route.
“If we stay calm and focused, it’s a very exciting period ahead… We have done research and the interesting thing is they compared different regions, and Stellenbosch has by far the highest visitor return rate. We have guys who have come to Stellenbosch 18 years in a row. You won’t find [a place] more beautiful. You have no idea how sexy Stellenbosch is.”
And like any good sportsman, he says his greatest asset is his team.
“You need strong players in your team… [The wine industry] is a little bit like top-end sport. It’s so competitive, if you don’t play with your best team, you are not going to win.”
What is it they say about wine and winning in the valley? It’s the same thing. And Coetzee agrees.

Electrifying

Alonely dirt road leads to a rustic farmhouse with old-fashioned shutters, wooden beams and creeping vines. By the entrance are a few ageing oak barrels, still sturdy and red from years of storing wine.
It is a fitting prelude to the man you are about to meet.
We are at Vriesenhof, a farm nestled between the Stellenbosch and Helderberg mountains in the Paradyskloof Valley of South Africa’s Western Cape. These winelands are rife with grapes and gossip, and boast a colorful cast of characters, mostly wine farmers who relate the valley’s stories, and often are stories themselves.
This is a world where wine and winning are spoken of in the same breath.
And in this cavernous house, a remodeled 18th century cellar, Jan Boland Coetzee, the renowned Springbok rugby player and venerable vintner, exemplifies both.
Within seconds of meeting him on this impromptu visit, Coetzee shows he is a true son of the soil. It is a warm April. Barefoot and brisk, in beige shorts, he darts from the living room, to the kitchen, to the backyard – where his elder daughter Hanle, who lives close by, is earnestly laying out tables for an evening do at the house.
<img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="alignleft size-medium wp-image-4024" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/KZ-Lodge-rim-flow-Pool-300x201.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="201" />
In the kitchen – shelves laden with wine bottles – there are sizzling sounds on the stove, followed by the aroma of – possibly – deep-fried fish cakes. Coetzee is issuing instructions to a few laborers at the back. He soon returns to sit at the large yellowwood dining table, decked with flowers in vases set like a Vincent van Gogh painting.
Originally Dutch, Coetzee says his ancestors came to the Cape in 1679. It is here, in this valley at the foot of the Stellenbosch mountains, that he learned the game of rugby and the art of making wine.
Coetzee purchased Vriesenhof in 1980 – “for its south-facing slopes on the cooler side of the foothills” – and has been here since, cultivating plantings of cabernet sauvignon, cabernet franc, merlot, pinotage and pinot noir, sold under the labels of Vriesenhof and Paradyskloof.
“I love to take pride in what is ours, what is South African,” says the valley’s doyen of pinotage.
“I focused on pinotage when I was young, as it is the only grape variety since its birth that has really taken on a commercial collective in the world of wine. And if it is doing well, it means we are proud of it, because it is born under the African sun, it is performing under the African sun, and we take pride because we believe it is ours.”
Coetzee pauses between words and sentences, but when he speaks, he makes you feel the earth around you: the air, the sun, the soil. Clearly, it is his territory – and terroir.
“Wine is a mirror of the environment first and foremost, because it is a product of the soil. In that, lies our future. Man needs to understand the soil, the plant, to put it in its right place in the right environment to give it its best. And the more you care, the better it gets,” he says.
The man has a deep love for the farm, and is happy just to be in it – with his glass of chardonnay.
“I love what I am doing, I love the farm, and I love drinking good wine. It’s as simple as that,” says the sprightly 70-year-old whose days on the 85-hectare farm begin at 4AM.
<img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="alignleft size-medium wp-image-4025" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/unnamed-300x200.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="200" />
Coetzee studied oenology and viticulture at Stellenbosch University.
“I didn’t become a vet so I became a viticulturist. It’s amazing how many winemakers wanted to become vets,”
he laughs.
“I still have the record for writing the most exams before I passed. So I have a very broad knowledge. Like the wooden barrel, it’s [like] the un-opening of old wine.”
While still a student, Coetzee became captain of the university’s Under-18 rugby team.
“Everyone in South Africa plays rugby from a young age,” he says.
He played for his provincial team, Western Province, from 1967 to 1979, and played flank for the national team, the Springboks, from 1974 to 1976.
He stopped playing when a tour was cancelled in 1979 on account of apartheid when South African sport also took a hit.
“From a South Africa point of view, things were bad in terms of international rugby because of apartheid. We were isolated… When the tour was cancelled, I stopped playing and went to France in 1981 to work in a wine house in Burgundy for a year,” says Coetzee.
That was the tipping point. He returned wiser, and helped lift the profile of wine in Stellenbosch. Today, he sells his wine all over the world; Scandinavia is his biggest market.
Coetzee may have stopped playing rugby, but he uses it well in his wine analogies.
“We used to export 74 percent of our crop, but now try and get as close as possible. We do 50:50 local and export. Rugby has taught me to have two legs. If you kick [with] one leg, one can hopefully stand on the other,” he says.
Coetzee vividly remembers that tear-jerking moment when Nelson Mandela handed the trophy to Springbok captain François Pienaar during the 1995 World Cup final. Coetzee was present, as a spectator.
“It was a special day, not only for sport but also for mankind. I remember that moment clearly. I can still see it.”
Coetzee has ensured his legacy – in both rugby and wine – lives on.
“My grandsons [between the ages of five to 10] all play rugby. They also made their first wine in 2015. Each of them has a barrel from the vintage of the year they were born in,” says Coetzee.
Divorced, Coetzee lives by himself. Fortunately, his four children are all into farming in some way, and visit frequently. His daughter Hanle says the most remarkable thing about her father is his humility.
“He has 40 years plus of experience of harvests and climates in the wine industry. He has seen good vintages, and bad. The new, younger winemakers are well-traveled, whereas in his time, the exposure and material were limited. He has old-world knowledge. If he drops dead tomorrow, it’s all gone, I don’t know how to capture it,” she says.
How much is he worth? Coetzee thinks long and hard, before answering: “I actually can’t put a number to it; we are not [into] numbers. We want to be loving and caring people, and that you can’t measure in currency. Money is an evil necessity. I am a big believer of the barter system – milk farmers and cheese farmers must drink wine, and I must eat cheese. They must produce meat, and they must drink wine. I try to convince all my farming colleagues in the mutton, beef, cheese, fish and lobster businesses to [barter].”
And are they listening? For sure, he says with certainty.
Coetzee has many admirers in the valley, across generations. About three kilometers from his Vriesenhof farmhouse, at the Kleine Zalze estate, its owner Kobus Basson, another Stellenbosch success, says Coetzee was instrumental in exposing him to the lifestyle around the wine business. He turned the rugby-playing lawyer into one of the region’s top wine farmers.
“Jan Coetzee is one of the characters of Stellenbosch, you can’t tell a wine story without him,” says the 57-year-old Basson of the senior entrepreneur.
“He is the type of guy [who] if there is snow in the mountains, would still walk in his short pants, with muscles like he has. He is a Stellenbosch legend, one of the five wine personalities that built this industry.”
Basson’s father was a figurehead in the local rugby club and that was his first connection with Coetzee. Plus, Basson’s initial 10-year legal practice ensured he interacted with most of the wine farmers.
“When you work with them, it’s like a friendship. Jan was the guy who spent a lot of time in France, and knew all the wine areas well. In 1996, I went with him and a few other prominent guys – while I was still a legal guy – on a trip to Argentina, and that gave me a completely different perspective of the industry. They were much ahead of us.”
Basson says South Africa’s wine industry matured only in the last 20 years. After he finished his law degree at Stellenbosch University, Basson took a year off to go to central Europe to be a rugby coach.
“I went there to play and coach and work on relationships, in what they called the European B-League rugby countries. It actually exposed me to other things – to wine, food and the lifestyle around it… I understood how the Germans, Dutch and French work in a different way with wine… I immediately got this idea about lifestyle and food and wine combinations.”
Returning to Stellenbosch, he practiced as a lawyer, and got into the wine business more by default than design.
“My wife came from a wine family, and told me she wanted to live on a farm. I said ‘forget it, I am not farming’. Eventually, in 1996, her brother was running the family farm, and was looking for an opportunity with a winery, and I told him about Kleine Zalze [that I had heard] was on the market. He asked me for money to pay the deposit, and that’s how I got involved. He said ‘in the meantime, you can have 50 percent share of it’, and before I realized, I was sucked into it, because this is a business that sucks in money, in terms of capital investment.”
They bought the 40-hectare farm and after the first harvest, signed up with importers from Britain, who had high expectations.
“I thought, ‘either you do it properly or bail out’. In retrospect, I can see how the year in Germany helped, how my friendship with Jan Coetzee formed me,” says Basson.
During the nineties in South Africa, golf and wine tourism was just starting, so he thought: “Why do we go to Tuscany and Provence, when we actually have everything here? Why can’t we create it here?”
It was hard work. Every day, for a decade, Basson woke up at 3AM.
“I had no choice. It was crazy and difficult years, the interest rates went up between 1998 and 2002. I had to invest my shares and everything I had. Cash flow was the challenge during those years; we had to slowly and steadily build this up.”
Today, Kleine Zalze is 280 hectares, including the wine estate, an 18-hole golf course, a 47-bedroom lodge and the award-winning Terroir restaurant with chef Michael Broughton. Basson says all the businesses are doing very well.
“We are doing well in terms of exports [too]; I would say we do more than 200,000 cases of Kleine Zalze wines a year. And we have won several awards,” he says.
Chenin blanc is the brand’s specialty.
The last season for wine tourism in Stellenbosch was wonderful, adds Basson, who is also a director of the Stellenbosch Wine Route.
“If we stay calm and focused, it’s a very exciting period ahead… We have done research and the interesting thing is they compared different regions, and Stellenbosch has by far the highest visitor return rate. We have guys who have come to Stellenbosch 18 years in a row. You won’t find [a place] more beautiful. You have no idea how sexy Stellenbosch is.”
And like any good sportsman, he says his greatest asset is his team.
“You need strong players in your team… [The wine industry] is a little bit like top-end sport. It’s so competitive, if you don’t play with your best team, you are not going to win.”
What is it they say about wine and winning in the valley? It’s the same thing. And Coetzee agrees.

Long Days Of  Sun, Rugby And Wine

Stellenbosch, located in South Africa’s Western Cape province, is famous for its world-class wineries, and is also a university town, boasting one of South Africa’s leading public research institutions.
Stellenbosch University is also home to Innovus, an award-winning technology transfer company, where Anita Nel is the lady in charge as CEO. Nel used to be a high school teacher in this pretty wine town and was with a start-up company prior to this high-profile assignment.
Innovus facilitates entrepreneurial support and development and manages commercialization of the university’s innovation and intellectual property portfolio through patenting, licensing and formation of spin-out companies.
Being CEO may seem like a tough task for a teacher-turned-innovator, but Nel is best equipped to understand entrepreneurship and the challenges facing new companies. She has led both a start-up and a venture capital firm that invested in technology start-ups.
On Nel’s LinkedIn profile, Sol Bezuidenhout, who has worked with her, says about her: “Her consistency as an overachiever is astounding. Anita is a driven, passionate and smart individual with vast business experience. She has no qualms in tackling the almost impossible challenges, and I yet have to see her fail. Anita is a great listener and cares after and inspires the people who work for her.”
Nel says her secret to success is asking: “If I fail, what will happen, if I succeed, what will happen and what is the most likely outcome. Does the most likely outcome fit my larger aspirations and if so, are the pros of success larger than the cons of failure?”
“I’m never afraid to ask for help if I need it. There is no shame in asking for it. I take advantage of the network I am part of and also of social media to tell people about our projects,” adds Nel.
“We, as individuals, should also keep in mind that we are brands in our own right and we should market and manage our own personal brands.”
The best path to entrepreneurship, she says, is to solve a problem that people live with but are unhappy about.
A major problem however is that “the African business industry is dominated by men so much that sometimes people address men in meetings even though a woman is the boss”.
“When that happens, I still participate and raise my opinion and ignore the negativity. I stand up for myself in a calm and constructive manner and speak logically about the issue and realize it is not about power but a common vision for a successful outcome. It is always better to come up with solutions than constantly report problems and build on negativity.”
In addition, she is of the opinion that business is sometimes difficult for women on account of the “paternalistic culture” but anyone can be successful. Patience is a key element of success.
“People feel that without a company there is no credibility but that it is not the case. It is better to wait until you are ready.”
The biggest mistakes entrepreneurs make is the inability to be flexible. Confidence in one’s products and solutions is key, but overconfidence is dangerous.
“My journey in business was better when I got a mentor. Having someone I trusted who could give me advice made life easier and made me a better boss. The more I listened to the advice, I noticed that not all criticism is negative,” she says.
Boss or businesswoman, Nel is clearly enjoying every moment of it.

AJ9_9888

‘Don’t Be  Afraid To Ask’

Oozing opulence, the South African wine industry has evolved into a key sector that contributes towards the country’s GDP. As a generational industry, transformation and development have been a constant cavity. New players within this $2.24-billion (R25-billion) industry are making world-respected wines, while also changing realities around black and female participation.
The Cape Winelands is the ultimate wine lovers’ pilgrimage. Most of the gems in South African winemaking can be found here. It is compared to the well-renowned Napa Valley in the United States and some of the greatest wine-making communities in Europe.
Initially seen as an old-money hobby, winemaking in South Africa has grown to such an extent that it is on par and in some cases superseding the quality of wines produced by the industry’s international counterparts.
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Female winemakers, such as Rose Jordaan, have changed the perception of women within the industry. Through dedication and consistency in quality winemaking, this former architect partnered with her husband – now exiting CEO of First National Bank, Michael Jordaan – and opened Bartinney Wine Estate in 2006. The 40-hectare estate is situated in Stellenbosch in the Western Cape. The charm of the property, combined with the quality of the wine produced, is a clear symbol of how this entrepreneur, mother and tri-athlete appreciates her life – simple, balanced and strategic.
“My first career as an architect groomed me for my current career as a wine proprietor. There are huge similarities, for instance conceiving a building with its context and constraints is similar to conceiving a vineyard within a unique territory,” says Jordaan.
Growing up in the winelands, winemaking has always been at the back of Jordaan’s mind and when the opportunity to purchase a fix-me-upper wine estate arose, she jumped at it.
“There is something extraordinary about being involved in such an ancient art that includes passion and guts,” she adds.
With her passion and commitment nestled in conservation and environmental protection initiatives, Bartinney wines are farmed organically – although still awaiting certification – with no pesticides or herbicides.
Jordaan started the Banhoek Conservancy, which has signed 95% of the land owners in Banhoek, Stellenbosch, with a commitment to further the aims of social and environmental issues in the valley. Bartinney is carbon neutral in both farming practice and winemaking. It reduces its carbon footprint by planting mostly endemic trees (over 7,000), and it has a photovoltaic bank (solar energy), which reduces power usage from the national grid by 50%. She has recently planted a ‘walking fynbos vineyard’, the first of its kind, and the permanent cover crop is planted with endemic grasses and smaller fynbos plants. Unemployment is high in South Africa and the decision to go without mechanization means that people are employed instead.
While Jordaan might be the new kid on the block, her short tenure has already seen her elected as the chairwoman of the Women in Wine Exchange.
“In this industry I have learned that through hard work and commitment you are able to receive tremendous support and generosity in return,” she says.
This role is to ensure that the female winemakers meet every two months to exchange ideas and empower one another through network building and identifying solutions to the day-to-day challenges that they face.
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“There is a tremendous need for young women within the industry to unite in an effort to change the face of the industry.”
She identifies the need for transformation within the industry, from gender issues to dissolving the color lines, as an imperative.
“The South African wine industry is one of the fastest-transforming industries with both the entry of women and the opening of doors to previously disadvantaged communities.
“I recently gave a lecture on the Biodiversity in Wine Initiative (BWI) of which we have Champion Status at the Pinotage Institute [a disadvantaged youth initiative], where the youngsters were very excited by the idea of conservation as an integral part of wine farming,” she says.
She understands that change is essential for an industry that is characteristically kept within the family. Jordaan is optimistic about the direction in which the change is occurring, but sees the government as a potential obstacle to the rate at which change could occur.
“Government taxes the wine industry heavily, I believe if all that tax money could go into educating the youth in the wine industry as well as supporting the disadvantaged communities involved in the industry, we would generally be moving in the right direction much faster,” she says.
Recently, a group of winemakers from the Cape Winelands collaborated with AfrAsia Bank in an effort to curb the affects of generations of great economic and social divide within the wine industry. The resulting AfrAsia Bank Cape Wineland Auction was launched in October, at the same hour in eight of the world’s most iconic wine-loving locations: São Paolo, Seattle, Zurich, Franschhoek, Mauritius, Hong Kong, Manila and Sydney.
This year will see the start of an exclusive wine auction with a difference. Its aim is to raise funds to improve the quality of education of children living in the Wineland regions. The three-day gathering for the AfrAsia Bank Cape Wine Auction opens on the night of March 13 with a party hosted by one of South Africa’s most prestigious Franschhoek properties. Multiple high-end Winelands events will follow before it will culminate with a luncheon and auction – a celebratory tour de force of wine and culinary elegance hosted by the country’s top winemakers and a culinary team lead by grande chef Margot Janse of Le Quartier Français.
Curated by 20 specially designated ambassadors, of which Jordaan is one, the auction offers everything from a single rare vintage to wine experiences to those who crave exclusive access to the beating heart of the wine industry. It’ll also provide Jordaan the space to grow further.
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A Rose Among The Vines

It’s one of those hot, cloudless days that make Cape Town residents smile inwardly at the good fortune that found them living in this particular corner of South Africa. About an hour outside Cape Town lies Stellenbosch, home to some of the country’s oldest vineyards, fruit farms and picturesque Dutch gable houses. Somewhere deep in the heart of this valley, there is a faint buzzing from warehouses filled with millions of flies, hatching, reproducing and dying. Down the corridor from the flies lie giant cement troughs filled with larvae, writhing and eating their way through rotten food, unaware that death is nigh. These larvae are destined to be processed into chicken and fish feed. For chickens diet of dried is lunch.
The man behind all of this at AgriProtein Technologies is Jason Drew. He is hoping to penetrate the South African agricultural processing market.
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“Flies feed on the blood from animal slaughterhouses, the fly larvae is in turn eaten by the chickens farmed for human consumption. Since the industrial revolution, chickens have not been eating fly larvae. In order to make the process sustainable, you have to close the loop,” says Drew.
The loop is focused on nutrient recycling, and Drew argues that it will become commonplace in years to come.
“If humanity is to survive without the starvation that has marked human history, until the last 50 years, it will most likely be a necessity. As we move out of the era of the Industrial Revolution and into the Sustainability Revolution, capitalists and environmentalists will become natural bedfellows, not the adversaries they once were in the old world order,” says Drew.
He is an environmental warrior incarnate. In his previous life, he led one of South Africa’s biggest online service outsourcing companies, Dialogue Group Holdings, to an initial public offering on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange and then guided the company around the various perils of the country’s second online boom. Drew served as CEO of the company and presided over its growth to 3,500 staff members and into five countries in Southern Africa. In 2008, a 40-year-old Drew suffered two heart attacks. He ignored the first, but the second made him pay attention.
“My doctor told me ‘You may not believe in stress, but your body does.’ We had owned our farm in the Tulbagh Valley for many years. After my second heart attack, my wife insisted I leave the rat race and we move down there permanently,” he says.
Drew and his wife spent the next three years traveling around Asia, South America, Australia and the Middle East and investigated various ecological principles in agricultural methods. While in Saudi Arabia, he spent time researching the feeding and breeding of cattle in agriculture cooperatives and became fascinated by the flies circling the pools of blood in the animals’ slaughterhouses. The investigation led him closer to home to a chicken farm in the Western Cape.
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“I met the slaughterhouse owner and followed the process through to the lake of blood behind the shed, which was surrounded by millions of flies. It occurred to me that it takes as much water, land and fuel to produce the chicken that we throw away as it does to produce the bits we eat. And we throw away a lot.”
Drew learnt that the chicken farmer had been involved in some field work done by Elsje Pieterse, head of monogastric nutrition in the department of animal science at Stellenbosch University, who was investigating the recycling of animal waste by-products using flies.
“And so began my love affair with flies,” says Drew.
Drew was joined by his brother, David, and the pair joined forces with local entomologists, food nutritionists and the research unit at Stellenbosch University, an endeavor which would result in the establishment of AgriProtein Technologies.
The company is currently in the process of completing production trials and testing system elements, which are intended as input into computer-aided design for full-scale factory producing chicken and fish feed from s fly larvae. The factory will be based in the Western Cape and is due to be commissioned during the third quarter of this year. It is expected to be completed by the end of 2013 at an estimated cost of $6 million. Fifty percent of this capital will come from shareholders at AgriProtein Technologies, while the remainder will be sourced from new ones.
“We are hoping that once our model is proved bankable, we will be able to go into a debt-equity combination. This is a straight forward commercial activity, but one that also looks to repair damage done to the environment,” Drew says.
The dichotomy of capitalism and environmentalism as well as the near-hero status of the humble housefly were first explored by Drew in his 2011 book The Protein Crunch (co-written by David Lorimer). The theme was followed by The Story of the Fly and How it Could Save the World (co-written by Justine Joseph) in 2012. In his latest book, Drew theorizes that the fly could join the ranks of fish, pigs, chickens, sheep and cows as the sixth and most numerously industrially-farmed animal in the world. The Lord of the Flies could end up king.

The Lord Of The Flies

Stellenbosch has become the South African pioneer of a new style of community development; a technological hothouse and African trendsetter with the introduction of free Wi-Fi, and a partnership with one of the world’s wealthiest entrepreneurs that is set to be rolled out to the rest of the country.
It is hardly surprising then that when 102 South African municipalities were evaluated in 2012, Stellenbosch was the second-best and one of two to achieve an astounding 85 out of 100 in the Municipal Financial Stability Index.
One of Stellenbosch’s pioneer products is the iShack system, an innovative approach developed by postgraduate Stellenbosch University (SU) students. Its purpose is to make simple yet significant improvements to the living conditions of residents of informal settlements.
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It is going to be scaled up with a grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, says Desmond Thompson, senior writer in the department of institutional advancement at Stellenbosch University.
The grant will cover a two-year pilot project in Enkanini, Stellenbosch. The eventual aim is to roll out the system to the rest of the country and beyond.
Between 40 and 100 shacks will be built or retrofitted with a basic solar energy system and insulated with used Tetra Pak containers and cardboard boxes to protect residents from extreme temperatures.
The iShack system is the result of a combined research project by Stellenbosch Universities’ TsamaHub and the Sustainability Institute (SI) at Lynedoch outside Stellenbosch, in collaboration with the Stellenbosch municipality.
The “i” in iShack stands for “improved”, and it entails cost-effective and sustainable modifications to the basic corrugated iron shack commonly found in developing countries around the world.
“The problem with the existing policy of in-situ upgrading is that people wait a long time for the energy and water grids to arrive, and thereafter for housing to be constructed,” says Mark Swilling, coordinator of the sustainable development program at Stellenbosch University’s school of public leadership.
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“Research shows that this can take eight years. What happens in the meantime? Do shack dwellers just wait, or are there things that can be done immediately? The iShack project is about demonstrating what organized communities can achieve in a short space of time.”
Where possible, shacks are reoriented to face north and will be provided with a roof overhang for maximum heat from the sun in winter and cool shade in summer.
Inside the shack, a clay wall along one of the sides provides thermal mass for passive temperature control.
“These strategies are not alternatives to conventional approaches. All improvements are compatible with the conventional energy and water grids if and when they arrive,” says Swilling.
“Given that all the technologies are mature and proven, the real learning during the pilot phase will be determining what social, institutional and financial arrangements would be required to make the system viable in the long run,” he says.
Pieter Venter, head of Stellenbosch municipality’s financial portfolio, says such is the housing backlog nationally that some residents would have to wait 107 years for a new home.
Therefore ingenious ways of upgrading informal settlements and households, like iShack and the remarkable Langrug-initiative, could become a blueprint for residential development in the whole of South Africa.
In Langrug, an informal settlement of 4,088 residents near Franschhoek, a partnership between the University of Cape Town (UCT), the Community Organisation Resource Centre (CORC), Shack Dwellers International (SDI) and the Stellenbosch Municipality is coming to fruition.
“We believe community-centered and driven development—in partnership with local municipalities, other non-governmental organizations and stakeholders—is the best approach to upgrade informal settlements,” says Aditya Kumar, Community Organisation Resource Centre technical coordinator and a Langrug project manager.
CORC piloted its unique approach in Langrug, where strong community leadership has emerged.
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“The Langrug residents have generated their own developmental agenda that has shifted the community mind-set from ‘free state-subsidized housing’ to ‘community-led settlement upgrading’,” says Kumar.
Community members conducted extensive research to determine their main concerns and probe for possible solutions, says community chairperson Trevor Masiy.
“We’ve come up with solutions and now we’re taking them to the [Stellenbosch] municipality,” he says.
Some solutions have already been implemented.
“They have opened access streets, relocated several families that block access to the settlement, built grey water channels, provided play parks for children, painted ablution facilities and set up health forums to assist with HIV/Aids counseling,” Kumar says in commentary published on the skillsportal website.
Helen Zille, premier of the Western Cape in South Africa, recently visited Langrug and enthused about the viable partnership between authorities and the community.
“The exciting thing about this project is that we are upgrading shacks where they are instead of moving people out and starting from the beginning,” she says.
Stellenbosch is arguably the first municipality in South Africa and Africa that offered accessible and free wireless connectivity to local residents.
According to the World Bank, a 10% increase in high-speed internet connections results in economic growth of around 1.3%. In other words, networked technology is crucial to a developing economy like South Africa because the statistics predict good economic returns on any investment made in the web.
Stellenbosch municipality partnered with the former chief executive officer of Mxit, Alan Knott-Craig, to initiate the project. Mxit agreed to donate not only their excess bandwidth to the initiative but also infrastructure support and technical know-how.
“Although free wi-fi can never compete in performance with paid-for services, it does provide a magnet for creativity and engineers,” says Knott-Craig.
Venter says they planned to give everybody in the community a cap of 500 megabytes a day. The next phase was to extend the network to the greater Stellenbosch area over six months, and thereafter target Franschhoek and Pniel.
Free connectivity and business partnerships might assist Stellenbosch in becoming Africa’s technology capital, and also enhance its reputation as one of the favorite tourist destinations in the country.
According to Annemarie Ferns, CEO of Stellenbosch 360, the Stellenbosch Tourism and Information Authority (STI), together with key role players, launched a new, holistic destination brand in 2011.
Appropriately named Stellenbosch 360, this ground-breaking initiative created the opportunity for not only tourism but business and other stakeholders to join hands and build a better future together.
The strategic goal for an inclusive tourism plan for Stellenbosch was to enhance and uphold the national and international reputation of Stellenbosch and also to market the town to local and international visitors.
The tourism budget of R1.8 million ($202,000) in Stellenbosch was minute compared to Cape Town with R36 million ($4 million) and Knysna with R4.5 million ($505,000). Without an integrated and strategic plan there could be only limited success.
The new buzz word in Stellenbosch, which has enhanced its economic growth and has contributed to its national standing as one of South Africa’s finest municipalities is “partnerships”.
For example, Ferns says Stellenbosch 360 wants to promote cultural tourism by finding community entrepreneurs that will provide tourists with authentic cultural local experiences.
Stellenbosch endeavors to bring these entrepreneurs into the mainstream of tourism and pair them with established tourism enterprises in and around the Stellenbosch towns.
Venter said Stellenbosch 360 is an excellent example of inclusive cooperation in the Western Cape focusing on growing the economy and creating job opportunities.

What You Can Do With  The Bill Gates Dollar

Woodstock and Stellenbosch in South Africa’s Western Cape are mere dots on the world’s IT map, but they could be Africa’s answer to Silicon Valley in the United States.
Tech entrepreneur Vinodan Lingham wants to make sure South Africa does get its own Silicon Valley and is putting his money where his mouth is.
Five of Africa’s top 20 tech companies are based in this small area of the Western Cape. Some of these companies are making waves on the global tech scene. One of them is internationally recognized Yola, which came second in FORBES AFRICA’s Top 20 Tech Start-Ups in Africa.
Yola is designed to assist small businesses by creating websites for free, initially. You only pay when your company advances and needs a more advanced website.
Lingham founded Yola in Silicon Valley in 2007 and lives there now. He says although adjusting to American culture was difficult, it only took him six months to get funding for his brainchild from JSE-listed Reinet Investments.
With offices in both San Francisco and Cape Town, Yola started out with venture capital of $25 million, but Lingham admits that starting Yola from scratch was not easy and credits naivety for his courage.
“Naivety breeds confidence. If I knew then what I know now, I wouldn’t have gone,” he says.
Seeing a large market opportunity, the likely chances of success crushed any doubts or fears the then 28-year-old may have had. Now 33 and one of Africa’s shining tech stars, Lingham was born in the Eastern Cape in South Africa during apartheid to a poor family, and was raised in a segregated area designated for Indians. With the end of the regime, his family rose to middle-class status so he could go to multi-racial Hudson High School, and then on to the University of Cape Town to study information systems.
“I was a total technology geek at school—definitely very entrepreneurial and probably the only person in school who could program when I was there.”
A successful entrepreneur with a third business to his name now, being a varsity drop-out has not deterred him along the way.
“I dropped out of varsity because my family couldn’t afford for me to study there.”
Being a permanent resident in California’s Silicon Valley for nearly five years now, Lingham has been around some of the tech world’s best brains, and says South Africa still has a long way to go.
“The skills are not at a high enough level. A lot of people go out and do theoretical stuff. There aren’t enough partnerships with businesses. Students come out of varsity with no skills. ”
Matthew Buckland, founder of Creative Spark, a digital agency based in Cape Town and a member of the Silicon Cape Initiative, agrees with Lingham.
“Universities also need to come to the party. Many of the world’s great start-ups were conceived at universities. We have a long way to go, but we’ll get there. Entrepreneurs are the future.”
The entrepreneurial spirit appears contagious in the Cape air. And people like Lingham make it look more attractive and tangible.
“I think Vinny is a machine. He’s an inspiration to many and it’s tough making it in San Francisco. I think it is positive for tech entrepreneurs in Africa. Vinny will gain valuable skills and networks that he’ll bring to the continent,” says Buckland.
Lingham criticizes that entrepreneurial spirit and says that, unlike back in California where most of the tech fundis started their companies during their university studies, he thinks the quality in SA is there but it could be better.
“The quality is there, but there’s not enough [of it]. There are about 50 honors students graduating a year from computer science and even less graduating with a Masters.”
Alan Knott-Craig Junior, owner of MXit, and digital media guru Matthew Buckland agree.
Knott-Craig Junior and Lingham cite the lack of updated cable infrastructure of the cables. Lingham criticizes Telkom’s monopoly as having a direct hand in the slow growth of the technology sector.
All three have a vision for the tech industry on the continent.
“I think there is a burgeoning start-up scene in parts of Africa, but it is still miniscule by world standards. Local venture capitalists need to put down real money on the table. They are far too cautious here, talk a big game and deliver little,” says Buckland.
Knott-Craig wants to conquer Africa through his social networking application; it enables users to use Instant Messages at a cheaper rate than SMSes on any applicable phone, not just smartphones.
Lingham sees the light at the end of the tunnel, but in his view it is obstructed by a confused giant.
“Law makers are getting in the way. South Africans just get ripped off on everything and the money isn’t even going to the poor. The Telkom monopoly hasn’t ended.”
Buckland agrees: “Government needs to come to the party with incentives and tax breaks for start-ups like the governments in the UK and France do.”
Hence the inception of the Silicon Cape Initiative, a vision that Lingham (among others) hopes will produce a mini Silicon Valley. It’s a 20-year non-profit vision, based on the same idea as Silicon Valley in San Francisco. It serves as a networking community, enabling self-started companies to have access to each other, and share knowledge and make it global. Funding for the initiative is foreign, and the aim is to expand SA’s talent to new shores.
“The innovation locally is doing well, but the problem is that globally we’re nowhere close to competing with the world. Companies coming out of Cape Town are trying to build new companies for a new market.”
Buckland acknowledges the efforts made by Lingham and company.
“Silicon Cape is an amazing concept. It’s run as a non-profit company by very busy people who do it on a pro bono basis. For the resources it has at its disposal, it has made amazing strides. Silicon Cape is both an idea for inspiration and a reflection of a reality taking place on the ground.”
He credits the guys in the Cape, saying: “The easy part is joining a corporate and learning the ropes. The hard part is coming up with something innovative—most people shy away from that. South Africans need to embrace failure. Young people have little to lose and can still take chances before reaching 30. Just focus on a certain problem that people aren’t working on.”

Tag: Stellenbosch

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‘Don’t Be Afraid To Ask’

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