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(Drink a lot)
- Takealot CEO and creator Kim Reid is “taking a step back,” the e-commerce giant announced on Friday.
- He will become president of the 2,500-employee group that also includes Mr D and Superbalist, and is looking for a new CEO.
- This is how Reid created Takealot, with mega capital injections and buying customers from rivals, creating SA’s largest online retailer.
- For more stories, visit www.BusinessInsider.co.za.
Online retailer Takealot is seeking a new group CEO, it announced on Friday.
Current CEO Kim Reid will soon become its president, Takealot said in a statement, “stepping back from day-to-day operations to focus on initiatives that will deliver future value for the group.”
Takealot is, by a significant margin, the largest e-commerce operator in South Africa. It employs more than 2,500 across three major brands (the group includes fashion retailer Superbalist and food delivery service Mr D), and its parent company Naspers believes it is strong enough to prevent Amazon from successfully entering the market. from South Africa.
That’s a position by Reid, an accountant who believes that success in e-commerce is all about capital, designed over a decade, securing mega cash injections from large corporations and buying from the competition.
This is how outgoing CEO Kim Reid created Takealot.
Reid came to e-commerce through accounting and music.
Kim Reid is a Chartered Accountant who worked at Gary Player Group and Barlows, and was CFO of Sony Music before joining Multichoice, then owned by current Takealot parent Naspers, as CFO in 2000.
It joined consumer Internet service provider (ISP) M-Web in 2003, promising to increase its focus on business customers. After a few years there, he moved to the top level of MIH Africa, the Naspers division with overall responsibility for some of their online businesses, including the electronic retailer Kalahari.net.
Takealot was officially launched in 2011, but its roots go back further.
The Take2 e-commerce website was launched in 2002. In 2010 it was acquired by the giant US investment firm Tiger Global Management, with a 15% stake for its new director, Kim Reid, reinvented as an entrepreneur.
Seven months later, things were moving fast. Take2 changed its name to Takealot, launched its first ad campaign, and revealed that it was acquiring a logistics company, with the undisclosed but presumably large cash injection from its new owners.
A surge in growth left the company with only one pocket rival: Naspers’ long-standing, albeit at a loss, Kalahari.net.
A food company turning 29 this year became the backbone of Takealot’s deliveries
The food service that has been called Mr D for many years, but is still fondly known as Mr Delivery, has its roots in 1992, a decade before the launch of Takealot’s parent site.
In 2011, Takealot bought a large minority stake in the delivery company, with an eye on same-day deliveries. In early 2013, Takealot took control, just as Mr. D was expanding into logistics more broadly, a course presumably charted by Reid.
Takealot split the food delivery company in two and eventually relaunched Mr D Food as a fully application-centric business, while also turning what it would call Mr D Courier into a high-tech, speed-oriented delivery operation. and complexity of electronic commerce.
From no acquisition plan, to buying your biggest rival, in months …
In May 2014, it emerged that Takealot had obtained $ 100 million from its owner, Tiger Global, a shot considered huge even in American terms.
But Takealot would continue to focus on organic growth and “had no acquisition plans,” Reid said.
If that was true at the time, it wasn’t for long.
In October 2014, Takealot and Kalahari announced a “merger,” on the grounds that they needed scale to compete with both traditional retailers in South Africa and global e-commerce giants like Amazon.com.
“The companies will continue to operate separately and serve their customers as usual during the holiday season,” an official announcement reads.
In May 2015, Kalahari.net was gone, after 17 years in business. Later, after the Kalahari staff were laid off, Reid said the deal had been about acquiring clients.
“[T]he strongest business survived, “he said in an interview in 2017.
… while working on another deal in the background
While making the deal with the Kalahari, Reid was also talking to another competitor.
Fashion website Suberbalist had been looking for investors for some time, both locally and abroad, without success. In early 2014, prior to Tiger Global’s investment, the site management met with Reid. In August, an agreement had been reached.
Unlike Kalahari, the Superbalist brand still exists, as a subsidiary of Takealot.
Enter Naspers, with much more money
The Kalahari merger, subsequent documents showed, gave Naspers a 46.5% stake in Takealot in what it represented as a R1.2 billion deal, with an “estimated gain per disposal” of R154 million.
In 2017, following the path of Tiger Global before him, Naspers made a large investment in Takealot, worth R960 million, putting him in control, with 53.5% of the shares under his control.
Later that year, Naspers bought Tiger Global, leaving only a small number of shares in the hands of management.
See also | 10 revolutionary businesses in South Africa that didn’t exist 10 years ago
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