Stephen Saad

Who Stephen Saad is

Stephen Saad co-founded Aspen Pharmacare and runs it as chief executive. Aspen is the largest pharmaceutical company in Africa, and the only South African business on this index whose output is measured in doses rather than rand.

In the 2023 financial year Aspen reported revenue of R40.7 billion. It employs around 9,100 people and, as at October 2021, operated 23 manufacturing facilities across 15 sites.

1997: a generics company from nothing

The originating Aspen business was founded in 1997 by a small group including Saad and Gus Attridge, alongside Steve Sturlese and a fourth shareholder. It listed on the JSE in 1998 under the ticker APN.

Aspen's founding idea was generics: making medicines whose patents have expired, at a fraction of the originator's price. It is a business with a particular character. There is no research gamble and no blockbuster upside; there is manufacturing scale, regulatory competence, and the ability to register the same product in many countries at once. You win by being cheaper and more reliable than the next manufacturer, in a market where the buyer is frequently a government.

For a company starting in South Africa in 1997 that was a good fit. The country was about to face the largest HIV epidemic in the world, with a health system that could not conceivably afford originator pricing.

Buying the industry

Aspen's growth was acquisitive, and the sequence is worth reading as a strategy rather than a list.

In 1999, two years old and one year listed, Aspen took over South African Druggists in a hostile bid worth R2.4 billion — an audacious move for a company of that age, and the one that gave it national manufacturing scale in a single step.

In 2009 it acquired pharmaceutical assets from GlaxoSmithKline, paying £268 million in shares, together with a manufacturing site at Bad Oldesloe in Germany. In 2010 it bought Australia's Sigma Pharma for US$1.24 billion. By 2014 it had expanded into 21 countries.

The pattern is consistent: buy mature products and the plants that make them from multinationals that no longer want them. A large originator's off-patent portfolio is a distraction — low growth, low margin, demanding of management attention. For Aspen those same products were the core business, and it could run them on a cost base a Swiss or British multinational could not match.

Why generics mattered here more than most places

The generics model is often described as the unglamorous end of pharmaceuticals. In South Africa in the 2000s it was closer to the whole argument.

An originator medicine is priced to recover the cost of discovering it, including everything that failed along the way. That is a defensible model in wealthy markets. Applied to a country facing the largest HIV epidemic in the world, with a public health system operating on a fraction of the per-capita budget those prices assume, it produced an arithmetic in which the medicines existed and the patients could not have them.

What generic manufacture changes is the arithmetic rather than the science. The same molecule, made by someone who did not have to pay for the discovery, can fall in price by an order of magnitude or more — which turns a treatment programme from impossible into merely expensive. A domestic manufacturer changes it further, because the medicine is then bought in rand from a plant inside the country rather than in hard currency from abroad.

That is the context in which Aspen grew, and it is why a company assembled out of other people's discarded product lines came to matter more to South African public health than its financial statements suggest.

Where the model is exposed

The same structure carries real vulnerabilities, and they explain the share-price volatility better than any single news story does.

Generic manufacture is a price-taking business. There is no pricing power in making a product several other companies can also make, so margins depend on being the lowest-cost producer — and that position can be lost to a competitor in another country with cheaper inputs. Much of the revenue comes from governments and state tender processes, where a single procurement decision can move a year's earnings and where payment terms are outside the seller's control. Manufacturing at this scale is capital-hungry, and a plant that regulators suspend earns nothing while it is idle. Currency cuts both ways: a weaker rand flatters reported revenue from abroad and inflates the cost of imported active ingredients.

None of these are failings peculiar to Aspen. They are the terms of the business it chose, and they are why a fortune tied to it moves more than one tied to a bank or a landlord.

The vaccine

From March 2021 Aspen took responsibility for the “fill and finish” of the Janssen COVID-19 vaccine — the final stage in which bulk substance is put into vials under sterile conditions and packaged. Later in 2021 the company announced a contract to produce 700 million doses by January 2023.

This was a genuinely significant moment for African pharmaceutical manufacturing. For decades the continent's position in the global medicines supply chain had been as a buyer, frequently at the back of the queue. A plant in Gqeberha filling vaccines at that scale was the first serious demonstration that the capability could sit in Africa.

It is the strongest argument available that Aspen is a different kind of company from most on this index. Whatever one concludes about the fortune, the manufacturing capacity is real, it is located here, and it did not exist before someone built it.

How Rateweb values him

Saad's position is, in principle, among the cleanest here: he is an executive director of a JSE-listed company, and directors' beneficial interests are disclosed in the annual report under the JSE's listing requirements. The number is a matter of record rather than inference.

Two things complicate it. Aspen is not among the twelve companies for which this index currently holds a market capitalisation, so his holding cannot yet be revalued from a live price the way Michiel Le Roux's Capitec stake can — it sits as a fixed estimate, and the index marks it as such rather than letting it pass for a live figure. And Aspen's share price has been volatile: a company whose earnings depend on large contracts, currency movements and regulatory decisions across twenty-odd countries does not trade smoothly.

Getting this entry onto a live footing is a bounded piece of work: Aspen's market capitalisation and Saad's disclosed directors' interest, both published, would convert a fixed estimate into a computed one. See the methodology for why that distinction is the one we care most about.

The founder who stayed

Saad has run Aspen since it was founded. That is unusual at this scale — most companies that grow from a 1997 startup into a multinational with 9,100 employees change chief executive several times, and most founders sell.

It matters for how the fortune should be read. Saad's wealth is not the proceeds of an exit sitting in a diversified portfolio; it is an operating stake in a company he still runs, which means it is exposed to that company's fortunes in a way a cashed-out founder's is not. He is also, uniquely on this index, one of two co-founders who both still hold positions: Gus Attridge, the deputy chief executive, appears here in his own right.

That pairing is worth a moment. Founding partnerships that survive nearly three decades of hostile takeovers, cross-border acquisitions and a pandemic contract are rare enough that the exceptions tend to be the companies that last. This index carries several such pairs — Aspen's two, the three FirstRand founders, the two who started Mr Price — and the pattern across them is the same: the businesses that compounded for decades were run by people who did not have to renegotiate who was in charge every few years.

What we do not know

The current size of his shareholding, which needs reading out of the latest annual report rather than assumed from an older one. What he holds outside Aspen — private investments, property and other interests are not disclosed. Whether any part of the stake is pledged, encumbered or held through structures that change the economic exposure.

We also do not model the tax position, and no figure on this index does. A founder's stake carries an embedded capital gains liability that would crystallise on sale, so a headline net worth is a gross number rather than what anyone would actually receive. That is true of every entry here and is worth stating once.

What we do know is above, dated and sourced. If you can improve it with a public disclosure, tell us.