Banking

African Bank eyes JSE listing in 2028

African Bank, rescued by South Africa’s central bank a decade ago, delayed its planned listing in 2025 by three years as it’s yet to complete preparations to take the company public.

“We want to make sure that when we ultimately list, we list very successfully,” Chief Executive Officer Kennedy Bungane told an investor call Tuesday.

“We think at this time that the listing will come at the back of full-year 2027 financial results,” but we will be guided by the market, advisers, the board and investors, he said.

African Bank’s financial year ends in September.

The central bank took a 50% stake in African Bank in 2014 after it collapsed under a mountain of bad debt and was unable to raise new funding.

It convinced the lender’s peers, including Standard Bank, Absa and the Public Investment Corp. — which manages the bulk of South Africa’s Government Employees Pension Fund — to acquire stakes and has been seeking to dispose of its shareholding since 2021.

African Bank also delayed the completion of its pre-initial public offering process that had been scheduled to conclude this year until 2025.

The lender has allowed employees to purchase a 10% stake and secured the GEPF, which owns 25%, as an anchor shareholder “beyond even listing,” Bungane said. That decision reduces the number of shares the lender will offer to the public, he said.

The next phase of African Bank’s pre-IPO process will be to develop a management plan to ensure key staff goals are strategically aligned with the company and address its Black economic empowerment rating, Bungane said.

South African companies are encouraged to adopt Black-empowerment plans to comply with government policies to redress financial inequality stemming from the apartheid era.

“It is an important to take this bank’s ownership back to the Black entrepreneurs who founded it in 1964,” he said.

Earlier on Tuesday, African Bank announced that its full-year profit after tax had grown by 0.4% to R523 million. The company posted a 4% decline in net interest income, partly because of a strategy to subdue growth in unsecured personal loans, according to a statement.

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