Vivian Imerman

Who Vivian Imerman is

Vivian Imerman buys companies, fixes them and sells them. He has done it with tinned fruit, Scotch whisky and, most recently, African beer — and the single transaction that defines him paid him £380 million personally.

He is the most purely transactional figure on this index. Almost everyone else here built one business and held it for decades. Imerman’s career is a sequence of entries and exits, which makes his fortune easier to trace than most and harder to pin to any one asset.

The Sunday Times Rich List put him at £390 million in 2018.

Surplus chemicals

Imerman was born in Johannesburg on 21 September 1955. His father Samuel was a chemist, and Imerman worked in the family chemical brokering business before starting his own — buying surplus chemicals and reselling them.

That is an unglamorous first business and it is the whole method in miniature. Surplus stock exists because somebody over-ordered or a plant changed specification; it is worth less to its owner than to a buyer who can find the next user. The trade is pure arbitrage: no manufacturing, no brand, no research — just knowing who has a problem and who has the corresponding need, and being willing to take the inventory off their hands.

Every deal that follows is a larger version of the same idea. Find an asset worth more to someone else than to its current owner, and stand in the middle.

Del Monte

In 1993, Imerman bought Del Monte International, backed by an investment from Anglo American plc. In 1995 the business listed on the Singapore Stock Exchange, reaching a value of £400 million. He sold his remaining stake in 1999.

Two things about that deal are worth noticing. It was a South African buying a global consumer brand at a moment when South African capital was barely welcome anywhere — 1993 being the year before the first democratic election. And the exit route was a listing in Singapore rather than London or Johannesburg, which is the mark of someone indifferent to where value is realised as long as it is realised.

Whyte & Mackay: the deal that made him

The Scotch whisky business, then called Kyndal, is the transaction that turned a wealthy dealmaker into this index’s kind of wealthy.

Imerman bought a minority interest funded by a £190 million loan from WestLB, in partnership with the Tchenguiz brothers, and increased his ownership from 35% to 60%, buying the remaining interest in 2005. In 2007 the business was sold to United Spirits Limited for £595 million (then about US$1.2 billion). Imerman received £380 million.

The mechanics are worth explaining, because this is what leveraged acquisition actually looks like when it works.

He did not buy the company with his own money. He borrowed the great majority of the purchase price against the assets and cash flows of the business being bought — the loan is serviced by the acquired company, not by the buyer. If the business performs, the debt is repaid out of its own earnings and the equity left at the end belongs almost entirely to whoever put up the thin slice of capital at the start. A modest equity cheque becomes an enormous return.

If it does not perform, the same arithmetic runs in reverse and the lender takes the business. Leverage does not create value; it concentrates whatever happens onto a small base. Scotch whisky was a well-chosen target for it: brands with centuries of standing, inventory that appreciates while it sits in a barrel, and predictable global demand.

Why it is always drinks and food

Tinned fruit, Scotch whisky, Ethiopian beer, South African wine. The category is not a coincidence, and the reason is a useful lesson about what makes an asset worth buying with borrowed money.

A leveraged acquisition needs one thing above all: cash flow you can forecast. Debt has to be serviced on a schedule regardless of how the year goes, so the target must generate predictable cash through a downturn. Consumer food and drink does. People buy groceries in a recession, and the brands are old, familiar and substitutable only at the margin.

Established drinks brands add a second property that almost nothing else has: the inventory improves while it sits. Whisky maturing in a barrel is stock that becomes more valuable the longer it is held — the opposite of the usual relationship, where ageing inventory is a warning sign. A buyer acquires not just a business but a warehouse of appreciating assets already paid for by the previous owner.

And these brands are hard to recreate. A distillery with a two-hundred-year name cannot be replicated by a competitor with money, because the one input required is time. That is as close to a durable moat as consumer goods offers, and it is exactly what a lender wants to see behind a loan.

Vasari, and the return to Africa

Imerman now leads Vasari Global and Vasari Beverages, which deployed more than US$250 million of capital between 2013 and 2018 and raised a further US$100 million in 2019.

The holdings include 98% of Dashen Brewery in Ethiopia, Rorank Distillery, and KWV in South Africa, acquired for US$85 million in 2016.

The KWV purchase brings the story home. KWV began as the co-operative that regulated the entire South African wine industry for most of the twentieth century — an institution rather than merely a company. Buying it is the same trade as the surplus chemicals, executed on a national asset: a business worth more to a focused owner than to the structure that held it.

Ethiopian brewing is the other half of the current thesis, and a more interesting one. A large, young, rapidly urbanising population with rising incomes and very low per-capita beer consumption is the demographic bet global brewers have been making across Africa for two decades. Owning 98% of a brewery in that market is a long-duration position, not a flip.

How Rateweb values him

Imerman is unusual on this index in that the proceeds are documented even though the current holdings are not. We know he received £380 million in 2007, and we know roughly what has been deployed through Vasari since. What we do not know is what any of it is worth now.

Vasari Global is private. Dashen Brewery, Rorank and KWV do not publish figures an outsider can value a stake against, and a 98% holding in an Ethiopian brewery is not something with a screen price. Our figure is a provisional constant from the index’s first build rather than a computed valuation, and it sits in the same region as the £390 million Sunday Times estimate from 2018 — which is itself now eight years old.

This entry therefore carries a low confidence rating. But it is worth distinguishing his case from Bridgette Radebe’s, where we have no published estimate at all. For Imerman there is a dated third-party figure and a documented payout to anchor against. That is thin evidence, not absent evidence. See the methodology.

The dealmaker’s problem

There is a structural reason Imerman is hard to value that applies to anyone who operates this way.

A founder who holds one listed company has a net worth that is a share count times a price — visible, continuously updated, and checkable by a stranger. A dealmaker’s wealth is between things: partly cash from the last exit, partly equity in the current vehicles, partly commitments to deals not yet closed, and frequently geared. It changes shape with every transaction, and most of the shapes it takes are private.

That is not evasion. It is what the job looks like. But it means any figure attached to someone like him is a snapshot of a moving object, and readers should treat it accordingly.

Leverage sharpens the problem further. A person who owns R1 billion of assets outright is worth R1 billion. A person who owns R5 billion of assets against R4 billion of debt is also worth R1 billion — but a fifth of the asset value could evaporate and take the entire net position with it. The two are identical on a rich list and are not remotely the same financial situation. Nothing in a published net-worth figure, ours included, distinguishes them.

What we do not know

What Vasari Global is worth and what share of it he owns. The current value of Dashen, Rorank and KWV. What remains of the 2007 Whyte & Mackay proceeds after eighteen years of redeployment. How much of the Vasari capital is his own rather than raised from investors — the US$100 million raised in 2019 was, by definition, somebody else’s money. And what he holds outside the beverages business entirely.

If you can point us at a public document that establishes any of these, tell us.