Cash-and-carry king Kirsh caps second act with R474.89bn sale

The $29 billion sale of a business serving chefs and grocery store owners across the US marks the culmination of a tumultuous, seven-decade career for South African billionaire Nathan “Natie” Kirsh.

With the disposal of Jetro Restaurant Depot LLC, a cash-and-carry food wholesaler, Kirsh is monetising the biggest asset in his family’s globe-spanning empire.

The sale to listed food-service giant Sysco Corp, announced late last month, has boosted Kirsh’s net worth by about 50% to $15.2 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, catapulting him up the ranks of Africa’s richest people.

Read: SA’s Kirsh to sell US company for R500bn

Jetro had talked to potential buyers including Sysco over the years, but the right timing and price proved elusive, said a person close to the organisation, who asked not to be named discussing non-public information.

Jetro’s board sees CEO Richard Kirschner as the right leader to steer the business under Sysco’s ownership, this person added.

The sellers say Jetro’s new owners will help it push into more markets. The company “always had a very clear purpose in serving independent restaurants and entrepreneurs,” said Bradley Fried, a longtime adviser to the family and a director at Jetro.

“Under Sysco, there’s a chance to do that on an even bigger scale.”

Kirsh now ranks third in Africa on Bloomberg’s wealth index, after Nigerian industrial magnate Aliko Dangote and Johann Rupert and family, the South African clan behind the Richemont luxury goods empire.

Jetro, which has 166 warehouse-style stores in 35 states, makes up more than 80% of Kirsh’s net worth.

The transaction will also help funnel more funds to Kirsh’s favored philanthropic programmes – empowering entrepreneurs to make the same kind of ambitious bets that Kirsh did, starting with corn mills in southern Africa.

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‘Pulverised’

Kirsh, 94, made his first fortune in his native South Africa and neighbouring Swaziland, now known as Eswatini, by producing and distributing food products and chemicals.

He later expanded into retail, insurance, and property among other areas, growing the business into South Africa’s third-biggest industrial group by the early 1980s.

Listen: Man behind the business: Who exactly is Nathan ‘Natie’ Kirsh?

By the middle of that decade, international sanctions aimed at ending South Africa’s apartheid regime had crippled the nation’s economy. Kirsh’s businesses, already struggling from soaring interest rates, faltered and he agreed to a cash injection from an insurer that came with onerous demands.

Kirsh wound up losing most assets save Jetro, then a tiny chain of stores on the US East Coast. “I got pulverised,” he told business school students decades later.

Starting over in New York City, he quickly identified food distribution as a headache for the independent grocery stores known as bodegas that occupy countless New York street corners.

Jetro’s cash-and-carry model won over bodega owners and revenue soared.

Kirsh bought a complementary operation, Restaurant Depot, in 1994 to cater to a broader range of independent food businesses.

Kirsh sought capital to grow.

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Among others, he called on Berkshire Hathaway Inc. Chief Executive Officer Warren Buffett. Around 2003, Buffett passed on the opportunity to invest in Jetro.

The following year, Jetro found alternative backers. One of those, Leonard Green & Partners LP, has been an investor since – an unusually long investment for a private equity firm.

“We are private, we are profitable and we have fun,” Kirsh, who rarely gives interviews, told Bloomberg in 2012, when he first emerged as a billionaire.

As Jetro grew, Kirsh diversified his empire widely. Convinced inflation wasn’t going away, he used cheap borrowing and cash thrown off by his businesses to buy real assets, saying property was the only sector where “stupid people” can make money. His international real estate holdings include Tower 42, London’s first office skyscraper.

Kirsh’s international real estate holdings include Tower 42 in London. Image: Chris Ratcliffe/Bloomberg

Kirsh is no longer active in day-to-day operations at his businesses. He plans to leave three-quarters of his assets to his three children and the remainder to philanthropy.

The family’s charitable Kirsh Foundation is guided by the maxim that begins, “give a man a fish”, and concentrates on programs that encourage self-sufficiency.

Two of the family’s signature philanthropic programmes support entrepreneurship.

The Inhlanyelo Fund in Eswatini has made micro-loans to more than 30 000 recipients, focusing on female and first-time business owners, and Keren Natan gives interest-free loans to new entrepreneurs in Israel.

Clients include Jewish, Arab, Christian, and Druze borrowers who wouldn’t otherwise have access to funding, according to the person close to Kirsh’s businesses.

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