“and then they fired me”

by Jannie Mouton, told to Carie Maas (Tafelberg)

Jannie Mouton’s nose for a good deal has led to him being labelled the Boer version of famous American investor Warren Buffett, with the two men noted for sniffing out shares or whole companies trading at a sizeable discount to their intrinsic value.

It’s like getting your hands on a ton of top notch chocolate at the price level of a lower brand at an opportune time and then selling it at the normal price later on for a sweet profit, but at a much greater level.

Imagine this: if you had bought R100 000 worth of shares in Mouton’s PSG Group in 1995 and reinvested all the dividends over the time and had done the same with the Capitec shares distributed to PSG shareholders, your portfolio would have been worth R88 million in December 2010.

Now that is some serious moola. If you would like to know how that is done and the philosophy behind it, then this business memoir from Mouton will come in handy.

He notably talks about several books he has found valuable himself, especially after he was kicked out of his previous company SMK and, after feeling sorry for himself, started a new concern that led to the success that PSG is today.

The Afrikaner-dominated financial services company has interests in businesses that have a total market capitalisation of more than R61 billion and two of Mouton’s children are currently involved in it.

A proud stranger to sick leave and lying idle, Mouton actually lists so many Afrikaans business people in the book that you might mistake it as a tribute to financial brains in that community against a history of political power concentration.

He reckons strategic planning is the “alpha and omega” to him, but reveals that he has also done well to surround himself with other clever, risk-taking people who had a less abrasive nature and which helped bail him out of some tough situations. – Carl Peters