Giovanni Ravazzotti

Who Giovanni Ravazzotti is

Giovanni Ravazzotti — usually Gianni — founded Italtile in 1969 and built it into the business that now manufactures half of every tile bought in South Africa and sells them through its own 203 stores.

In the 2025 financial year the group reported revenue of R8.87 billion, operating income of R2.06 billion, net income of R1.49 billion and total assets of R10.86 billion. It trades on the JSE as ITA.

His is the most boring business on this index and one of the most instructive.

1969

Italtile was founded in 1969 as Italtile Retail. The name is the origin story: an Italian immigrant selling Italian tiles to South Africans at a moment when imported European finishes were a mark of a certain kind of home.

It listed on the JSE in 1988, nineteen years in. The group is headquartered in Sandton.

Fifty-seven years is a long time to sell the same product category, and the longevity is the point rather than an aside. Nothing about tiles has fundamentally changed. What changed is how much of the chain between the clay and the customer this company came to own.

It is worth pausing on the nineteen-year gap between founding and listing, because it runs against the instinct that raising outside money early is how a business grows. A company that waits that long to go public is one that funded its own expansion out of trading profits — store by store, at whatever pace the cash allowed. The cost is slower growth; the benefit is that the founder still owns the thing at the end of it. Several of the largest fortunes on this index were built that way, and it is the single most reliable pattern here: the people who ended up with the most are usually the ones who sold the least of their company on the way up.

Owning both ends

Most retailers buy from manufacturers. Most manufacturers sell to retailers. Italtile does both, and that is the whole business.

On the retail side it runs three store formats aimed at three different customers: Italtile Retail at the premium end, CTM in the mid-market, and TopT at the budget end — 203 stores in total as of 2025.

On the manufacturing side it owns 17 factories through Ceramic Industries and Ezee Tile, with capacity to produce 52 million square metres of tiles a year. As of 2024 it manufactured 50 per cent of all tiles purchased in South Africa.

Read those two paragraphs together and the position becomes clear. When a customer walks into a CTM and buys a box of tiles, Italtile frequently earns the manufacturing margin and the retail margin on the same box. A competing retailer earns only the second, and buys from a manufacturer who may well be Italtile.

Why vertical integration works here specifically

Owning the factory is not automatically clever — it is capital-intensive and it removes the flexibility to buy from whoever is cheapest this year. It works in this particular category for reasons worth understanding.

Tiles are heavy and low-value relative to their bulk, which makes freight a large share of the delivered cost. That is a natural barrier against imports: a container of tiles from Europe or Asia carries a shipping bill that a local kiln does not. A domestic manufacturer with scale is structurally advantaged in a way that, say, a domestic electronics assembler is not.

They are also fashion-sensitive but not technology-sensitive. Formats, colours and finishes move with taste, and a manufacturer that also owns the shops sees demand shift in real time rather than through a distributor’s order book six months later. Owning the customer relationship makes the factory better at guessing.

And the three-brand structure means a customer trading down in a bad year moves from Italtile Retail to CTM to TopT — and stays inside the group the whole way. That is defensive revenue engineered deliberately, the same logic Christo Wiese applied in clothing and Whitey Basson in groceries.

Listed, but still controlled

Italtile has been a public company since 1988 and is still identified with its founding family thirty-eight years later. That combination recurs across this index often enough to be worth naming.

A listing is normally where founder control ends. Raising public money means issuing shares, issuing shares means dilution, and a founder’s percentage falls with every capital raise until the company belongs to institutions and the founder is a large shareholder rather than the owner.

The families on this index who avoided that did so in one of three ways. Some used dual-class shares, where a special class carries votes out of proportion to its capital — Johann Rupert controls 51% of Richemont’s votes with 10% of its equity. Some retained special voting rights attached to a block, which is how Christo Wiese regained the Shoprite chairmanship in 2019 over other shareholders’ objections. And some simply never needed the money: a business generating enough cash to fund its own expansion does not have to keep issuing shares, so the founding stake is never diluted in the first place.

The third route is the most durable and the least discussed, because it requires no clever structure — only a business that funds itself. A retailer collecting cash at the till and a manufacturer selling everything it makes are both in that position.

The construction cycle

The honest counterweight is that this business is tied to something it does not control.

Tiles are bought when people build, renovate or move. That makes the group a fairly direct read on South African residential construction and household confidence — and construction is among the most cyclical activities in any economy. Interest rates, disposable income and the state of the housing market move this revenue line, and no amount of operational skill offsets a decade in which people stop renovating.

A manufacturer feels that harder than a pure retailer, because a kiln is expensive whether it is running or not. High fixed costs magnify a downturn in the same way vertical integration magnifies an upturn.

There is a second exposure worth naming. Firing ceramic tiles takes an enormous amount of heat, which makes this one of the more energy-intensive manufacturing operations in the country. Electricity price increases and supply interruptions land directly on the cost of every square metre produced, and a producer at this scale cannot simply switch the kilns off and on. For a South African manufacturer that is not a hypothetical risk; it is a permanent line item.

How Rateweb values him

This should be among the better-evidenced entries here, and with a small amount of work it will be.

Italtile is JSE-listed. The Ravazzotti family interest is a matter of public record in the company’s annual report, under the disclosure obligations that come with a listing. Unlike the private fortunes elsewhere on this index — Mmakau, Vasari, Jetro before its sale — there is a document that answers the question.

What is missing is on our side. Italtile is not among the twelve companies for which this index holds a market capitalisation, so the holding cannot be revalued from a price and sits as a fixed estimate; and the figure we carry is a provisional constant from the first build rather than something read out of a disclosure. See the methodology for why that distinction matters more to us than the size of the number.

Fixing it is bounded and specific: Italtile’s market capitalisation plus the family’s disclosed shareholding converts this entry from asserted to computed.

A note on the name

Our index lists him as Giovanni Ravazzotti; Italtile’s own corporate history calls him Gianni, the Italian diminutive of the same name. Both appear in South African business coverage. We use the formal version for the index entry and note the other here, rather than silently picking one and leaving readers who know him by the other unsure they have the right person.

What we do not know

The current size of the family’s holding and how it is split between family members and trusts. What the family owns outside Italtile. Whether any part of the stake is encumbered. And what succession looks like for a business founded fifty-seven years ago by a man who is now well into his eighties — which is a real question for the share price and therefore for this figure.

If you can point us at Italtile’s current major-shareholder disclosure, tell us.