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Koné Daouda Soukpafolo's cotton company now owns 72.29% of Uniwax, the Abidjan wax fabric manufacturer, after completing its purchase of the stake the Dutch textile group Vlisco held for decades.
Compagnie Ivoirienne de Coton, known as COIC, acquired 15 million Uniwax shares in a private transaction disclosed in four ownership filings published on Friday, Sept. 18. The price was not disclosed.
The shares came from three Vlisco entities. FRAGECI, the Ivorian holding company through which Vlisco controlled Uniwax, sold 14,632,275 shares, or 70.5% of the company. CFCI SA sold 262,500 shares and Vlisco B.V. sold 105,225. Uniwax has 20.75 million shares in issue and trades on the BRVM, the regional stock exchange based in Abidjan.
The deal was agreed in February and needed regulatory approval before it could close. COIC said it intends to take a direct role in Uniwax's governance within the next twelve months.
Uniwax was founded in the late 1960s and makes the printed wax fabric worn across Côte d'Ivoire and its neighbours for everyday clothing and ceremonies. Its factory sits in the Yopougon industrial zone of Abidjan, and it is one of the last industrial wax producers left in West Africa. The sale comes during a financial recovery at the company.
The purchase takes Koné from raw cotton into finished cloth. COIC built its business on ginning, which separates cotton fibre from the seed, and on primary processing. Owning Uniwax extends the group into textile manufacturing, in line with a government push to add more value to Ivorian cotton inside the country.
Koné is known in Ivorian business as the "king of cotton." He comes from Korhogo in the north, was one of 14 children, and lost his mother as a child and his father as a teenager, leaving him in charge of the family and its farming business.
He founded COIC in 2006, as the cotton company LCCI was running into trouble, and took over two of its ginning plants after LCCI went bankrupt the following year. In 2017 he bought the Compagnie Ivoirienne pour le Développement des Textiles, known as CIDT, which made him the largest operator in the sector, and doubled its output that year after rehabilitating three of its factories.
His group has since expanded into agribusiness, transport and financial services, including Versus Bank.
Vlisco, founded in the Netherlands in 1846, had controlled Uniwax through FRAGECI for decades.
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