The Wealth Secret I learnt from Amazon
William Mukaria
Kenya Managing Director at Educate! | AUTHOR: "The Big Leap" | Entrepreneur | Trainer
Recently the world was wowed by the news coming from Seattle, Washington: that Amazon has clicked $1 Trillion in market capitalization. This effectively put Jeff Bezos, the Amazon CEO and Founder as the richest man in modern world with an estimated $150 Billion personal net worth (Forbes 2018).
What the analysts and the media never told us explicitly is that Jeff owns only around 15% of Amazon. They also never told us that Jeff had created an astonishing $850 Billion wealth for so many other Amazon shareholders. This is profound and this is where my point is. Most of us think that by holding on your small business, you'll become so famous. That if you're the sole owner with 100% shares, you will be great. Wrong. If Jeff became selfish and kept holding Amazon shares all for himself, it's very possible that he would not even be featuring among the top 500 Forbes list of the rich.
I posted here several months ago that if Nakumatt Holdings had a true vision of being a Pan African retailer and compete side by side with likes of Shoprite, then they had to shed this title of 'family business'. They were already too big to be called family. They would have made effort to list in NSE and probably get external investors who would pump money, bring in global expertise and take a large chunk of risk. The Shah family would probably lose their position as a dominant shareholder and also much pressure would be off their back.
Shoprite has a market cap of $7.4 Billion (Business Insider, 2018). This is approx. Ksh 740 Billion. Compare this with Nakumatt valuation at its peak - Ksh 34 Billion. Shoprite operates 2,850 retail supermarkets in 15 countries of Africa and no one else has ever come this close...and they are just 8 years older than Nakumatt. Am not sure what % of shares the founders of Shoprite hold but certainly they're not the dominant shareholders.
If Nakumatt would open up to to receive the world into her business, they would be huge and the Shahs would probably be 10x richer with a sprawling business empire. Africa is still a virgin land for retail. That's why clever guys like Carrefour and Walmart (Game) are snapping retail space in Kenya like overnight.
Am just drawing parallels with the Amazon.
Hah! What was I saying?
Well, your wealth could be tied to your willingness to loosen your grip and make other people wealthy and not how much you hound for yourself.