Africa’s top 500 companies: champions in mining, oil, construction powering ahead
‘A revival with fanfare’ is how the latest ranking of the most important 500 African companies drawn up by Jeune Afrique magazine might be best described, with profits amounting to $80,84bn in total.
After analyzing the results of more than 1,200 companies, the French-language pan-African weekly news magazine unveiled its exclusive ranking of the 500 top companies in Africa. For this 24th edition, which covers the 2021 financial year, the cumulative turnover of the ranking jumped by nearly 12%. At $664.93 billion, it thus reached its highest level since 2014, which then stood at $690.5 billion. The peak of activity in 2012, however, remains a good distance away with its 757 billion dollars.
Hit by the Covid pandemic and then by the fallout of the Russia-Ukraine war, African companies have had to deal with an ever-uncertain business environment, synonymous with both pitfalls and opportunities.
The ranking shows that Africa’s most important companies have managed to overcome the successive crises of the mid-2010s, born of the depression in raw materials, and the monetary storms experienced in 2015-2016 by two of the continent’s heavyweights, Egypt and Nigeria and to a lesser extent South Africa.
The revival of business activity is also reflected in an increase in their profits. It bears witness to a large part of the African economic recovery in 2021, before the various disruptions arose in 2022, born particularly from the Russia-Ukraine war — inflation, rising interest rates and monetary disorders.
The spectacular recovery in the price of raw materials under the effect of demand from China and elsewhere, reinvigorated in the wake of Covid, has contributed to the overall buoyant economic mood in many companies operating in the primary and agricultural sector. Whereas in the previous edition the telecoms sector had shown good resistance, this year MTN, Vodacom or Maroc Telecom are losing places to the benefit of groups operating in cyclical sectors, such as oil and gas.
Benefiting from the soaring price of phosphate, the activity of Morocco’s Office Chérifien des Phosphates (OCP) jumped by half (in dirham terms), catapulting it four places to 11th spot, very close to entering the Top 10.
Four new entrants are positioned in the Top 100. They are Airtel Africa (Nigeria), ENI Angola (Angola), Société Marocaine de Distribution (Morocco) and Sodiam (Angola).
Apart from South Sudan and Equatorial Guinea, all countries on the continent had positive growth in 2021, some even posting rates among the best in the world, such as Rwanda (+ 10.9%), Morocco (+ 7 .9%), Côte d’Ivoire (+ 7.4%), Kenya (+ 7.5%) or the DRC (+ 6.2%).
The continent’s three largest economies saw more subdued levels, at 3.6% for Nigeria, 3.3% for Egypt, and 4.9% for South Africa.
