Lodestone Brands
Taking Businesses to the Next LevelLodestone Brands is looking to expand its acquisition portfolio across Africa, building on an initial six years of success in the FMCG marketWriter: Matthew StaffProject Manager: Callum Philp Lodestone Brands is aiming to apply the same, vast amounts of experience and expertise that helped initiate the company, to produce the next generation of fast moving consumer goods (FMCG) entrepreneurs.Incepted in 2009, with the initial investment from Standard Chartered Bank of $170 million, the company is a brainchild of former Tiger Brands CEO, Nick Dennis alongside partners John Seymour and Shaun Bruyns.The idea was to achieve sustainability and longevity through the acquisition of a series of market-leading FMCG brands, to take them to new levels of success, and to establish Lodestone Brands as a top-two player in each of its core operating sectors; being sugar confectionery, beverages, and baby care. “When meeting with Shaun initially, I said I wanted to continue to work on something that had longevity,” CEO, Dennis recalls. “Shaun then spoke to John Seymour, and we decided to see if we could replicate, in a much smaller way, what had been achieved at Tiger.“It was about building a branded FMCG business and using our experience, including learning from previous mistakes, to try and get things done in a far shorter time frame.”Seymour adds: “The brief was essentially to combine Nick’s unparalleled strategic and operational expertise in fast moving consumer goods, with Shaun’s and my financial and investment skills, and to build a business by way of acquisition.The next levelThe subsequent…
Lodestone Namibia
New iron ore mine for Namibia Africa Outlook discusses the challenges and opportunities of opening a new iron ore mine in Namibia with the CEO and CFO of Lodestone Namibia. Carsten Mosch, Lodestone's CEO, and David Hinsley, its CFO, are principal investors in the project in Dordabis, which is located 70 km south-east of Windhoek. Writer Ian Armitage Project manager Debbie Clark Namibia is a middle income country which has enjoyed considerable successes since it gained independence from South Africa in 1990. It is renowned for sound economic management, good governance and inherited a well-functioning physical infrastructure, a market economy, rich natural resources, and a relatively strong public administration. Namibia has made significant progress too in addressing many development challenges like job creation, education, primary healthcare services, safe water, poverty and inequality. In the 2013 World Bank /IFC Ease of Doing Business Study, Namibia ranked third out of 25 African countries. In the Ernst and Young Emerging Markets country rankings, it ranks ahead of the likes of Turkey, Colombia, Mexico and all of the BRIC economies. It is this that has attracted international investors (Namibia has attracted the 15th most FDI projects in Africa since 2003, which ranks it as the top African investment destination on a per capita basis). It is in this context that Africa Outlook interviewed the management of Lodestone - just as they were drawing a close to their latest round of exploratory drilling and were finishing their Namibian mining license application, which they expect to submit at the end of August.…
