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Christo Wiese. TJ Strydom
Читать онлайн.Название Christo Wiese
Год выпуска 0
isbn 9780624085867
Автор произведения TJ Strydom
Жанр Биографии и Мемуары
Издательство Ingram
Companies with foreign borrowings were, however, not part of the standstill and Pepkor had to take its own measures to manage its debt.
Less than a month after the Rubicon Speech, Pepkor announced that it would raise capital from shareholders. Pepkor planned a rights issue of R55 million. Pepgro, which housed Wiese’s controlling stake in Pepkor, announced its own plans for a rights issue of nearly R30 million and declared that Wiese would take up his rights.
Wiese forked out millions of his own money in this recapitalisation exercise. He said it had been decided much earlier that the company’s debt-to-equity ratio needed to improve to 1:1, and that forex losses were not the reason for the move.39 Clearly the company wanted to reduce its debt and wean itself off foreign loans, which had proved so vulnerable to fluctuations in the exchange rate. ‘All borrowings are being brought onshore as soon as possible. The company has already started paying back some offshore loans,’ said Wiese.40
It later became apparent that part of Pepkor’s foreign exposure had not been covered because it seemed as if the rand might stabilise at R2 to the dollar. ‘However, the disastrous slide in the rand after [the] declaration of the partial state of emergency, followed by the declaration of the moratorium on the repayment of foreign loans, caused the group to suffer further extraordinary foreign exchange losses,’ the company declared in its half-year report.41
The board decided that it wanted to get forex losses out of the company’s system once and for all.42 Pepkor made provision for R25,9 million to cover all future forex losses. ‘We’ve made a mistake, but we’ve now learnt a good lesson. This will be the last time that we suffer losses such as these,’ said Wiese.43
Even if it was a big mess, the rest of the economy was also in dire straits, so, comparatively speaking, Pepkor did not look too bad. In 1985 it still ranked 8th in earnings on the JSE and generated the 25th best return for its shareholders.44
But the capital the company raised45 from its shareholders was not enough to lower the company’s debt ratio sufficiently. The interest burden became heavier and heavier, and the damage done by forex losses was difficult to repair.
By 1986, the interest Pepkor paid on loans had ballooned to R40 million and forex losses to R52 million – basically, enough to erase the company’s operating profit. Long forgotten were the few millions in forex profits that Pepkor had boasted about after its first year of borrowing abroad. ‘The forex profit the group initially made on its foreign loans is the most expensive profit it ever made,’ said Wiese.46
At Pepkor’s annual general meeting that year he denied in the strongest terms that the group was teetering on the edge of the abyss and that it needed to be rescued. Die Burger quoted Wiese as saying that nothing could be further from the truth. He did say, however, that Pepkor wanted to achieve a more acceptable debt ratio. The problems the company still had would be eradicated before the end of the financial year, he said.47
The year 1986 was a tough one. ‘Christo is coping, though most businessmen are having a tough time due to the political climate,’ his father-in-law wrote to a friend in the US.48
How long the political turbulence would last, no one knew, but Pepkor would need another bout of restructuring to get back on track.
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