Mo Dewji "the richest man in Tanzania"

Steph Curry · 2014-11-15T11:05:05+00:00

Mohammed Dewji is the third generation of a family of successful Tanzanian entrepreneurs. Over the past decade, as CEO he has grown his family's business from a national trading house to a multi-billion-dollar, multinational conglomerate, generating a $2-billion fortune for himself in the process. Dewji believes the future of business is in Africa. After a week visiting his various operations across Tanzania, it is easy to see why. When most people visit Tanzania, their primary destinations are usually a safari in one of its picturesque game parks or the sweet-smelling spice markets on the island of Zanzibar. I spent my time crisscrossing Tanzania on a safari of a different sort – tracking some of the numerous entities that make up Mohammed Enterprises Tanzania Limited (MeTL), the unique and diversified group of companies that has made 39-year-old Mohammed Dewji one of Tanzania's wealthiest and most important men. My first stop was the sprawling A-One bottling plant in an industrial zone just off Julius Nyerere Road, one of Dar es Salaam's main arteries. After a mid-afternoon arrival from Lagos, it was perhaps the best place to try to shake off my cross-continental, red-eye-flight-induced stupor. My guide, Nitin Vishwakarma, a five-year veteran of MeTL and the executive assistant to Mohammed Dewji, made sure I received a bottle of Mo Bomba Energy Drink, the MeTL Group's recently introduced competitor to the internationally known Red Bull. "Try it," he insisted and handed me a golden bottle. I've never been one for energy drinks, but surrounded by top A-One executives and a number of staff in the quality control and testing lab where we stood, I felt obliged. Much to the delight of the whole lab, I quickly downed a 275ml bottle specially designed for the local market. It went down easily, with a refreshing carbonated kick. I sheepishly asked for another bottle and soon felt my haze lifting away. Out on the main factory floor, multiple production lines staffed by young Tanzanian men and women in casual clothes, except for their hospital blue hairnets, hummed loudly as they churned out bottle after bottle of A-One soft drinks at high speed. Each of the three lines at the A-One plant can produce and fill 24,000 beverage bottles an hour. The plant runs 22 hours a day, producing up to three million cartons of various flavoured drinks per month and generating almost $50 million in revenue last year. It is a small segment of the MeTL Group's annual $1.5 billion revenue, but A-One's amazing productivity is evidence of a strategy Dewji has employed with almost every manufacturing concern he owns in Tanzania: find an underperforming or derelict business, buy it cheaply and invest in new equipment and management that will turn the company into a cash-producing asset. A-One, which MeTL created by merging a number of companies acquired between 1999 and 2000, is just one of many examples. After spending $48 million to turn the plant around and develop eight new soft drink products priced to be affordable for the local low-income population, A-One is now profitable. MeTL competes successfully with Coca-Cola and Pepsi in the local beverage sector and hopes to dramatically increase its local and regional market share over the next few years. "I will only look at a business that is in trouble or poorly managed, and I see potential in that business," Dewji told me during one of our numerous conversations. "For example, this guy is struggling. He's got one product. He's got limited working capital. He's borrowing at high cost – they get killed here with high cost of borrowing. He doesn't have distribution. He has to give credit. So I know that, one, if I take over, my cost of borrowing is going to be half of his; two, this will be another product I will just place through all my outlets and just sell; and three, I have the necessary systems to be able to manage this in a better way." In other words, Dewji, who studied finance and international business at Georgetown University and briefly flirted with a career on Wall Street after finishing school, has turned his family shop from an import-export trading house into a hybrid manufacturing conglomerate and leveraged buyout firm. Dewji has no plans to let go. He sees no point in taking the family business public, at least not for another 10 years. "I think we are highly highly undervalued. I can go get debt where I'm paying less than 3 percent for short-term money, 4.5 percent interest for medium term. I would rather borrow than pay 12 percent dividends and giving equity to people. I'm first scaling up to a very sizeable business then consolidating. So I think within a 10 year spectrum I will definitely look at taking some of my companies public." For Dewji, who admires do-it-yourself billionaires Warren Buffet and Aliko Dangote, there is no cashing out, no quick road to massive wealth. "I've learned one thing, and I always tell this to the youth: you cannot make money overnight – unless you do illegal things. But generation of wealth is like climbing stairs. It is step-by-step, block-by-block. When I was younger, I used to always try to think that the pace, that my pace was slow and that I needed to make more and more money. But as time went, I kept understanding that there is no magic. Magic is only that you've got to work hard, you need to have luck, you need to be ethical, you need to be clear on your vision and then drive that vision. And that is not easy. I work crazy hours. It's not easy." Ventures Africa recently valued Dewji's personal net worth at $2 billion dollars. Nawasilisha, ni kweli huyu bwana anawakimbiza akina Bahressa na Rostam..

Thread starter Steph Curry
Start date Nov 15, 2014

Steph Curry

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Mo Dewji "the richest man in Tanzania"

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