SA Billionaires Index Methodology
The Rateweb South African Billionaires Index ranks South Africa's wealthiest individuals by estimated net worth. Every figure is an estimate. We do not claim figures are exact, and we do not verify them with the individuals listed.
How we estimate net worth
Each person's wealth is built up from individual holdings, then totalled in rand. Listed holdings are revalued automatically every day from current JSE share prices — so when the market moves, the index moves with it.
- Public (JSE) shareholdings — a disclosed stake is recorded as a fixed number of shares and valued at the current JSE price (value = shares × price). This portion updates automatically.
- Private companies & other assets — a disclosed estimate based on publicly available revenue/profit, industry multiples, known transactions and credible reporting.
- Debt & liabilities — deducted where publicly available.
When a private business has an agreed price
The hardest fortunes to value are the ones held in large private companies. There is no share register, no ticker and no daily price. The conventional answer is to take the price-to-earnings or price-to-sales ratio of comparable listed companies, apply it to the private company’s profits or revenue, and then discount for illiquidity. We do not do that. The choice of comparable company and the size of the discount are both judgements, and a judgement applied quietly across many profiles is not a valuation — it is a guess with arithmetic attached.
Occasionally something far better becomes available: a named buyer agrees a price for the whole business. An announced transaction is a public document, it carries a date, and it is the considered valuation of a party spending its own money rather than ours. Where one exists, we use it — on four conditions:
- We value the person’s disclosed stake against the announced consideration to shareholders, not against the headline deal value, which may include debt the seller never receives.
- Where sources disagree about the size of that stake, we take the lowest sourced figure.
- We exclude consideration we cannot price. A deal paid partly in the buyer’s own shares is worth more than the cash alone; where we have not sourced a share price, the cash portion is a floor, and we say so rather than estimating the rest.
- We state plainly that an announced deal is not a completed one. Transactions fail on competition clearance and on conditions, and until one closes the seller owns a company, not the proceeds.
What this produces is deliberately a floor rather than a best guess, and it will usually sit below the figures other indices publish for the same person. We would rather give you a smaller number and show you the arithmetic than a larger one you have to take on trust.
Where our data comes from
We use public records only: JSE share prices and listed-company disclosures, SENS announcements, company annual reports, and ownership/directorship information disclosed via CIPC. We do not scrape or copy Bloomberg, Forbes or any other index — share counts and stakes come from public disclosures and are then revalued from live JSE prices, the same bottom-up approach a serious index uses.
Confidence ratings
Each profile carries a confidence rating — high (mostly public, market-linked wealth), medium (a mix of public and estimated private assets), or low (largely private and harder to verify).
Corrections
We welcome corrections supported by public evidence. Contact us to request a review.
