Amabubesi Investment division Amabubesi Capital is on a mission to be sustainable beyond being an investment and BEE company. It aims to use its Capital Technologies division to achieve this.
Says Amabubesi Capital Technologies (ACT) CEO Angus Young: "We want to build a significantly large ICT company, and are benchmarking ourselves against GijimaAST, Dimension Data, BCX. We want to be large, not only in terms of market capitalization, but in the diversity of the business."
To that end, Young says the company has divided its thinking into stacks, and is currently making acquisitions to build those stacks horizontally and vertically, for example, an infrastructure stack that offers services from the bottom up and caters for the needs of SOHOs, SMEs and enterprises.
"We want to buy into companies that meet three criteria - very good leadership, profitable and sustainable in its own right and a high growth business. The stack system says we can bring the intellectual property of various companies together and create a brains trust.
"That way we will end up with an infrastructure group, whether virtual or holdings. We believe brands and entities are mutually exclusive. We really want to build brands and be the number one player in any market segment."
Young says the company is working hard in the infrastructure and telco segments at the moment. On the telco side, the company is investing in the entire supply chain from base station manufacturers to fibre cables, radio planning, maintenance etcetera.
"You need to take ownership of the value stack or you create dependencies," says Young. "For example, a manufacturer becomes dependent on suppliers. Owning the value chain is important because you can control that in the longer term."
Young says Amabubesi has R600 million to spend and, to date, has spent R50 million of it. It is in discussions to spend R180 million on an infrastructure company, has four deals in the pipeline at around the R40 million mark, another four in the R10 million to R15 million mark and several deals in the R3 million to R4 million mark on the table. "We're hoping to spend that by December," he says.
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