by Ekrem Duman | Aug 25, 2026 | South Africa Banking & Finance, South Africa Company Stories
⚡ TL;DRFirstRand was built by a small group of entrepreneurial bankers who turned a merchant bank into South Africa’s most valuable banking group, running FNB, RMB and WesBank as distinct businesses with distinct cultures under a holding company whose main...
by Ekrem Duman | Aug 25, 2026 | South Africa Banking & Finance, South Africa Company Stories
⚡ TL;DRStandard Bank is Africa’s largest bank by assets, built from a nineteenth-century colonial trade financier into a continental group operating in twenty African countries — after an expensive detour into global emerging markets that it largely...
by Ekrem Duman | Aug 25, 2026 | South Africa Company Stories, South Africa Mining & Resources
⚡ TL;DRSouth Africa holds the overwhelming majority of the world’s platinum reserves in the Bushveld Complex, employs well over a hundred thousand people mining them, and faces the uncomfortable position of owning a near-monopoly in a metal whose principal...
by Ekrem Duman | Aug 25, 2026 | South Africa Company Stories, South Africa Mining & Resources
⚡ TL;DRSibanye-Stillwater was spun out of Gold Fields in 2013 as a collection of late-life South African gold mines nobody wanted, and its management turned aggressive acquisition into a strategy — buying platinum assets during a downturn, adding American...
by Ekrem Duman | Aug 25, 2026 | South Africa Company Stories, South Africa Mining & Resources
⚡ TL;DRGold Fields was founded by Cecil Rhodes in 1887, mined the Witwatersrand for over a century, and then did what the whole South African gold industry eventually had to do — leave. Today most of its production comes from Australia, Ghana, Peru and...
by Ekrem Duman | Aug 25, 2026 | South Africa Company Stories, South Africa Mining & Resources
⚡ TL;DRDe Beers turned a mineral that is not actually rare into the world’s most emotionally loaded purchase by controlling supply through a buying cartel and manufacturing demand through the most effective advertising campaign ever written — then...
