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For a generation, Kate Fotso ran Cameroon's cocoa trade in partnership with Cargill. In January 2025 she walked away from it. The next season was the worst in her company's history. This one, she took the export lead back.
Julius Rone is targeting September for the go-ahead on Nigeria's first floating LNG plant — a locally-led project designed to capture offshore gas the country has spent decades burning off. The prize is real: turning a wasted resource into export revenue. But so is the risk.
Mounir Nakhla plans to float only MNT-Halan's Egyptian arm in Cairo, at up to $1 billion — and keep its faster-growing Turkish, Pakistani and Gulf businesses in private hands, inside a group valued at $1.4 billion in June. The interesting part of the IPO is what he is holding back.
Ladi Delano built a premium vodka brand in China and got rich. He announced a $1 billion Nigerian investment venture that produced nothing anyone can point to. This week his third act, the mobility company Moove, raised $250 million at a $2.1 billion valuation.
Globacom turns 23 this month, and Mike Adenuga still owns every single share of it. While MTN Nigeria and Airtel Africa listed and raised billions, and 9mobile changed hands twice, Glo stayed wholly private — and slipped from a genuine challenger to a distant third.
In 2011 Nicky Oppenheimer sold his family's 40% of De Beers to Anglo American for $5.1 billion, valuing the whole diamond company at $12.75 billion. This month Anglo agreed to sell 85% of the same company for about $1 billion.
Magda Wierzycka arrived in South Africa at thirteen, a Polish refugee with almost nothing, learned two new languages, and built a financial-services firm now worth billions of rand.
Oando just returned to profit — a ₦68.6 billion half-year — and its shares have fallen 28% since May. Both facts are correct, and the gap between them is the whole story.
Two importers control 98% of Kenya's cooking-gas market. In months, Rostam Aziz's $130 million Mombasa terminal becomes the third door into the country — East Africa's largest LPG store.
Paul Obambi bought the iron-ore project a South African major had given up on, then spent a decade chasing the one thing that would make it worth anything: a 450-kilometre railway to the ocean.
Patrice Motsepe's African Rainbow Minerals is spending about $925 million to reopen a platinum mine it shut two years ago — a bet that the whole sector's retreat went too far. Inside a contrarian wager, and why the timing, not the thesis, is what's on trial.
Angola raised $321 million floating 15% of Unitel — the mobile operator it took from Isabel dos Santos four years ago. The largest IPO in the nation's history is really a test of a much bigger question.
In the early 1990s a French engineer bought an ageing Gabonese oil field that Amoco had written off. That single unwanted reservoir became the model for an $11.4 billion fortune built almost entirely on the barrels the majors abandoned across Africa.
Two Kenyan businessmen spent six years and a maze of holding companies fighting to control SportPesa. This week, filings showed an untraceable firm in the United Arab Emirates now holds 54% of the operator.
Merck handed Aspen the right to make a once-monthly HIV pill across 129 countries. It is the second pharma prize Africa's largest drugmaker has landed this month.
Stephen Saad said you have to be within six months of the first launch to be part of market formation. This week Africa's largest drugmaker won approval to sell a generic Ozempic in Canada — and then discovered it has no ingredient to make it with.