Nicky Oppenheimer's $15 billion empire after De Beers

Fourteen years after Nicky Oppenheimer sold his family's last stake in De Beers, the investment business he built with his son Jonathan has completed another deal.

In August, Ghana's Genser Energy bought back the entire stake held by Oppenheimer Partners, Jonathan Oppenheimer's private equity firm, ending a five-year investment in one of West Africa's leading power and gas companies. Oppenheimer Partners first invested in 2021 as a preferred shareholder and converted to ordinary shares in 2023, when it held 40.4% of the company. The price of the buyback was not disclosed.

The exit is the latest in a string of deals that show how far the family has moved from the business that made its name. Since 2012, the Oppenheimers have put money into Nigerian beverage cans, South African cancer clinics, Moroccan furniture, Kenyan meat, Nigerian payments technology, a Philippine retail platform and a private airport terminal in Johannesburg.

Their fortune has kept growing along the way. The Bloomberg Billionaires Index values Nicky Oppenheimer, 81, at about $15 billion as of Monday, making him one of the three richest people in Africa.

The family office behind the fortune

The modern portfolio was built on one transaction. In August 2012, the family sold its remaining 40% of De Beers to Anglo American for $5.2 billion, ending more than 80 years of Oppenheimer control of the world's largest diamond company. Nicky Oppenheimer, who ran De Beers as chairman, said he planned to put most of the money into private equity, much of it focused on Africa.

The family brings its investments together under Oppenheimer Generations, a single-family office set up in 2018 to represent the interests of Nicky and Jonathan Oppenheimer. It is based at 6 St Andrews Road in Johannesburg, with additional offices in London and Singapore, and has between 51 and 200 employees. Jonathan Oppenheimer is its executive chairman.

The group describes itself as a mix of commercial businesses and nonprofits. Its businesses include Tswalu, Fireblade, JAN, Niarra, Weeva, Oppenheimer Partners, Oppenheimer Generations Asia and Shangani Holistic.

Its Asian arm, Oppenheimer Generations Asia, was set up in Singapore in 2021 and is led by managing director Edoardo Collevecchio. Its best-known deal so far is in the Philippines. In August 2024, it invested $5 million in Growsari, a technology platform that supplies the country's sari-sari stores, the small neighborhood shops that sell everyday goods across the Philippines. The investment was part of Growsari's Series C round. Growsari, founded in 2016, had annual revenue of between $10 million and $50 million in 2023, according to data firm Tracxn. The family office also invested in BluLever Education in 2023.

A separate arm, Nianova, manages what the family calls its lifestyle investments. They include a partnership with Jan Hendrik van der Westhuizen, the South African chef who earned a Michelin star for his restaurant JAN in Nice. The partnership runs Restaurant Klein JAN at Tswalu, where many of the chefs come from rural communities near the reserve. Nianova's businesses also include Niarra Travel, a luxury travel company.

The family has already exited one of these ventures. Weeva, a software company that helps hotels and lodges track their environmental and social impact, was recorded as an exit in September 2024, according to PitchBook. The terms were not disclosed.

Private equity from Lagos to Nairobi

The family's longest-running private equity vehicle is Tana Africa Capital, a joint venture with Temasek Holdings, the Singapore state investment company. Tana was set up in 2011 and says it has raised $650 million since then. It invests in consumer goods, retail, education, healthcare and agribusiness, and its companies operate in more than 20 African countries.

Its most successful bet so far was Promasidor, the African food company behind Cowbell milk. In 2016, Tana sold its 25% stake in Promasidor to Japan's Ajinomoto for $399 million.

Tana's current and past holdings show a clear preference for companies that sell everyday goods to Africa's growing middle class. They include Kitea, a furniture retailer with more than 40 stores in Morocco, Kenya and Ghana, and QMP Group, a large meat processor in Kenya. Tana has also invested in Pasta Regina, a Moroccan pasta maker, and Siat Group, a plantation company. In recent years, it has moved into Nigerian retail and fintech. In August 2022, it invested in Sundry Markets, a Nigerian grocery and retail business, alongside Sango Capital. It also counts Interswitch, the Nigerian payments company valued at more than $1 billion, among its investments, and in March 2024 it backed M-Kudi, a Nigerian payments startup.

Jonathan Oppenheimer, 56, built his own investment business alongside the family's. He began his career at N M Rothschild & Sons, became a senior vice president at Anglo American in 1999 and held senior roles at De Beers for two decades. He founded Oppenheimer Partners in 2016.

Its largest deal is in Nigeria. In 2023, Oppenheimer Partners took full ownership of GZ Industries, Nigeria's largest maker of aluminum beverage cans, by buying the remaining 37.5% stake from Affirma Capital. GZI supplies cans to major drinks companies, including Coca-Cola, which ties the family to the growth of Africa's beverage market.

In South Africa, the firm bought a majority stake in Amrod, the country's largest supplier of branded promotional products, from Carlyle-backed Alterra Capital Partners. The deal was announced in November 2022 and completed in the first half of 2023. Amrod sells more than 14,000 products through a network of over 7,000 distributors, can brand 300,000 items a day and has branches in Nigeria, Botswana, Kenya, Zambia and Namibia.

The firm has also built a position in specialist healthcare. It invested in Icon Oncology, a South African company that provides clinical, administrative and business support to oncology practices, including through the Independent Clinical Oncology Network. Alongside it, Oppenheimer Partners bought into Flexcor Twenty Two, a property company that owns 15 buildings with about 16,700 square meters of lettable space, most of it leased to Icon Oncology. The firm has said it sees Icon as a platform for building a specialist healthcare group across Africa.

Fireblade, Tswalu and the land

The family's most visible business in South Africa is Fireblade Aviation, which Nicky Oppenheimer founded in 2014. Fireblade runs a private terminal at OR Tambo International Airport in Johannesburg for business jets and executive charter flights.

The terminal drew the family into one of its few public fights with the South African government. Fireblade said it had obtained 27 approvals from government departments and agencies, and that then-Home Affairs Minister Malusi Gigaba had approved customs and immigration services at the terminal in January 2016. Gigaba later denied giving that approval.

Fireblade sued. In 2017, the North Gauteng High Court ruled in its favor and found that Gigaba had lied under oath. In 2018, the Constitutional Court dismissed Gigaba's application for leave to appeal, and the Public Protector separately found that he had told an untruth under oath. At a hearing in Parliament during the dispute, the Oppenheimers denied that the terminal was meant for their exclusive use. The terminal later began processing international flights.

The Oppenheimers also own some of the largest private landholdings in southern Africa. Tswalu Kalahari, which Nicky and Jonathan own together, is South Africa's largest private game reserve, covering more than 100,000 hectares in the Northern Cape. It operates as a luxury safari lodge and a conservation and research center, and the family ended hunting there after taking it over.

Across the border in Zimbabwe, the family has owned Shangani Ranch since 1937. The 65,000-hectare property runs about 8,000 head of cattle and doubles as a wildlife sanctuary.

Stockdale Street and the family's giving

Bloomberg and much of the press, including Billionaires.Africa, have long described Stockdale Street, a Johannesburg private equity firm, as one of Nicky Oppenheimer's main investment vehicles. The firm itself says it is part of Mary Oppenheimer Daughters, the investment group of Nicky's sister, Mary. It says it advises her family and other wealthy families on South African private equity investments.

The firm was set up in 2003 and is named after the street in Kimberley where De Beers had its first head office. Neither the family nor the firm has publicly set out what interest, if any, Nicky Oppenheimer holds in it.

The family's public profile now rests as much on policy and philanthropy as on business. Its nonprofit arms include Oppenheimer Generations Research and Conservation, which runs scientific work on the family's land, along with the Brenthurst Foundation, a Johannesburg think tank focused on economic growth in Africa, the Oppenheimer Generations Foundation, the Oppenheimer Memorial Trust and the Brenthurst Library, which holds one of the most important private collections of Africana in South Africa.

In March 2020, as the COVID-19 pandemic reached South Africa, Nicky and Jonathan committed R1 billion through the South African Future Trust to support small businesses hit by the lockdown. Jonathan Oppenheimer has said the trust plans to recycle the money it recovers into training and other programs for small businesses. He also sits on the board of trustees of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

Taken together, the investments show a family that has swapped one dominant business for many smaller ones. Instead of controlling a single global diamond company, the Oppenheimers now hold stakes in factories, retailers, clinics, technology and travel businesses across Africa and Asia, along with land and an airport terminal at home.