eBusiness Weekly
Enacy Mapakame
Budding entrepreneur Lloyd Chiyangwa anticipates to groom other emerging companies in the next decade and ensure they grow into large conglomerates and eventually go public on the equities market.
This, he seeks to achieve through his company – Ax Capital Private, an equity firm that provides private equity, quasi-equity and mezzanine instruments for financing development, tech initiatives and expansion of projects and companies and digital assets advisory services.
The firm also focuses in all sectors of the economy but, mainly on information technology, telecoms and blockchain, an area that is expected to grow with leaps and bounds as the world over adopts technology to solve today’s challenges.
Chiyangwa, who is the chief executive officer and managing partner at Ax Capital, said the idea was to build a strong capital markets base in Zimbabwe, especially the small to medium enterprises, which are expected to grow into large corporations and eventually list.
Zimbabwe has also been mulling introduction of a secondary exchange that caters for the small to medium enterprises as a way of helping them raise capital for their expansion projects. The main bourse is still regarded as an elitist with listing requirements deterrent to budding enterprises.
But the Zimbabwe Emerging Enterprise Market (ZEEM) listing requirements and rules will allow small and SMEs to list on the secondary bourse and enjoy the benefits of going public.
“In five to 10 years, I would have invested in 35 to 100 start-ups and SMEs in Zimbabwe, and get them listed on Zimbabwe Stock Exchange. We need to build capital markets here in Zimbabwe,” he said by email.
So far, Ax Capital, has invested in three companies in retail business, fashion and beauty as well as baking and confectionary.
Chiyangwa, who studied finance, says his zeal has always been on growing capital base therefore looked for opportunities for realising his passion.
“I have always had a taste for making money. Not just making money, but in a strategic way,” he said adding his first investment towards establishing Ax Capital was from his savings from internship and his first job after graduating in November 2017.
Despite the prevailing challenging economic environment, Chiyangwa sees potential and opportunities in Zimbabwe especially for the growing SMEs, which has driven his company into investing in their growth.
Like any other equity investment company, Ax Capital does due diligence before any capital injection into budding enterprises.
Said Chiyangwa: “The first thing we look at is the blueprint, then we look at feasibility and see if it can be done.
“We also look at the market, cashflows, sustainability, scalability and finally profitability – that is why we are getting into business. After all that, we assess risks which will translate to how much equity we will be willing to accept in your company.”
Although, Ax Capital has not offered mezzanine instruments yet, its management remains upbeat of availing more funding for upcoming companies and looks at spreading towards technological innovation, in line with global trends.
Chiyangwa, however, indicated Zimbabwe and the rest of Africa were slow in adopting technological innovations, despite the great potential it has in changing business processes and lifestyles.
But, in ten years, Zimbabwe will be singing a new tune.
“The only major challenge in Africa overall with fintech is that we have a tendency of shutting off new technology that we don’t understand instead of learning around it and get an appreciation.
“But technology is really good. Look at blockchain technology, we can build a lot of applications on it to solve main problems we have in Africa and Zimbabwe,” he said.
