Consumer wealth in the South African retail market is dominated by one man: Christo Wiese. And Forbes sets the scene well in their first paragraph on the South African billionaire:
Table Mountain, the striking mesa above Cape Town, lords over another impressive African monument: the multi story Golden Acre shopping center. Lunchtime crowds pour into the glassy, brightly lit structure, and from within it is impossible not to notice the dominance of South Africa’s second-richest man, Christo Wiese. His bargain-bin clothier, PEP, pulls foot traffic to the basement. Above it, you’ll find his more upscale Ackermans chain. Around the corner is his OK Furniture and his grocery chain, Shoprite, which takes up two floors.
As a South African, the one thing that ties all those places together are low, affordable prices for a quality of goods that sometimes lasts, but lasts for at least a season. Wiese’s promise of low prices is what made him worth billions:
The business has basically been built on one slogan: Low prices you can trust. Just very, very low everyday prices. I suppose we could be described as the Wal-Mart of Africa.
Understanding that people in this country have very low budgets, Wiese wants to give them value for money. And it’s not as if his philosophy is killing his business:
Publicly traded Shoprite does revenue of $9.9 billion a year, while PEP’s parent company, Steinhoff, brings in $11.8 billion (some of it from selling cellphones and home furnishings). Combined, they net almost $2 billion in annual profits, operate more than 9,000 stores in 30 countries and employ over 200,000 people. No other African retailer comes close to rivaling their breadth and depth, and Wiese controls both.
[source: forbes]
