Throwback shows JSE changes
1995: 600 COMPANIES WERE LISTED THEN AND THE FOUR LARGE BANKS ARE ALL STILL THERE
Brad Binder was born. DStv was launched. Petrol cost less than R2 a litre.
Nearly 30 years ago, in 1995, South Africa was a very different place. The country had just voted in its first democratic elections. We won the Rugby World Cup (for the first time!). Tokyo Sexwale was the premier of the PWV (Pretoria-Witwatersrand-Vereeniging region), which was renamed Gauteng in mid-1995.
Queen Elizabeth II visited SA. Moto3 World Championship winner Brad Binder was born. Pay TV provider DStv launched (but not until October). Petrol cost R1.88 a litre.
The JSE looked vastly different in 1995. Well-known finance commentator on X (formerly Twitter) Karin Richards last week shared a table previously posted by Greg Davies in 2018 of the Top 40 as at December 1995. At that point, there were 600 companies listed on the exchange.
Only six of the companies in the Top 40 then – Anglo American, Richemont, Standard Bank, Sasol, Nedcor, Absa and Gold Fields – are among the 40 largest shares on the JSE today.
Arguably, that list could also include a further five:
SAB (acquired by AB InBev); Rembrandt (offshoot Remgro is now in the Top 40);
Gencor (which eventually became BHP);
Liberty Holdings (offshoot Shaftesbury Capital is the 39th largest company on the JSE by market cap); and
First National Bank (which eventually became a subsidiary of FirstRand).
Mining dominated the Top 40 companies – about a dozen operated in the sector.
Anglo American dominated mining
It owned four of the Top 20 on the JSE. Minorco, set up in Luxembourg, housed its non-African,
non-diamond mining assets. Its diamond assets were in Anglo American Investment Trust.
These all disappeared into Anglo by the time it listed in London as Anglo American plc in 1999. The exception was De Beers, in which it owned a sizeable stake alongside the Oppenheimer family and the Government of Botswana. It acquired the Oppenheimers’ 40% share in 2011, taking its share to 85%.
Anglo dominated much of the industrial and financial sectors of South Africa too, owning stakes in a large number of companies outside of resources. Today, rather remarkably, there remain a dozen mining companies in the Top 40.
BHP has no operations in SA, Glencore a few, but these are not that significant given the scale of the group globally. Only Anglo still has its sizeable Anglo American Platinum operations, and it has Kumba Iron Ore.
Most of the remaining large mining groups in the Top 40 are concentrated in the gold and platinum sectors.
The four large banks are all still in the Top 40 (FNB has since become a subsidiary of FirstRand), but they are joined by Capitec, whose market capitalisation (R237 billion) is almost equivalent to that of both Absa and Nedbank put together (R238 billion).
Investec is also in the Top 40 these days. Sanlam is absent from the 1995 list as it only demutualised in 1998. Liberty Life became Liberty Holdings, which eventually became a subsidiary of Standard Bank until it was delisted in 2021.
Discovery was only three years old in 1995! Outsurance was only founded three years later.
The only retailer in the Top 40 in 1995 was Edcon. It no longer exists. Shoprite, Clicks and Pepkor are in the Top 40 now.
MTN and Vodacom were tiny in 1995 – they had just begun operations and cellphones were still something of a novelty (and pricey!)
The largest company on the JSE, Anglo, had a market cap of R51 billion. These days, the “smallest” company in the Top 40, Outsurance has a market value of R62 billion. However, in inflation-adjusted terms (courtesy of a very handy online calculator), Anglo’s market cap would be equivalent to R243 billion today. Its current market value is around R700 billion.
Standard Bank’s market cap now is about triple the inflation-adjusted value from 1995, Gold Fields’ is six times greater, and Sasol’s is about 30% more.
Only six of the companies in the Top 40 then are among the 40 largest shares today