Publications
Partners
Johannesburg - South African steel tycoon Eric Samson was ready to finish the job.
At a tense board meeting of the Nelson Mandela Children’s Fund in 2014, members grappled with how to complete construction on its flagship hospital in Johannesburg.
The building was backed by Samson, a friend of the late SA president, and was behind schedule and short of cash.
“We thought we should be on the ground already,” Sibongile Mkhabela, the fund’s CEO, said by phone. “As we were looking at the numbers, Samson simply said ‘I will put in R100m’. And that was that.”
The $8.4m donation comes as Samson, 76, unwinds an industrial empire that he spent more than five decades building across three continents.
His fortune, most of which is derived from steel and real estate assets he quietly amassed through his Macsteel holding company, is valued at $1.1bn, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.
He’s never appeared on an international wealth ranking, and didn’t respond to phone and e-mail requests seeking comment.
For Samson, selling shares to the public was never an option.
“We’ve ploughed back our profits and funded our own expansion,” he was quoted as saying in a 2006 article in the Financial Mail newspaper, one of only two interviews he’s ever granted. “We’ve never needed the glorification. We simply got on with our business.”
Selling Assets
Last year, he sold 28 South African commercial properties that are home to the businesses and service hubs of Macsteel Service Centres SA. The real estate, owned by Macsteel Coreprop, Macsteel Genprop and Macsteel Service Centres SA, was bought for $272m by Johannesburg-based developer Redefine Properties.
Three years earlier, he sold Macsteel Services Centres USA to Duisburg, Germany-based Klockner & Co. for $660m, according to press releases at the time.
Samson has spent his whole life in the steel business. He joined his father’s fencing and wiring business, Pan Africa Staalhandel, after finishing high school in 1958, according to a 2008 post by Macsteel on a trade group’s website.
He became a managing director of the business in 1965 after it merged with competitor S. Machanick & Co.
He founded Machanick Steel & Fencing after buying land in Wadeville, an industrial area of Johannesburg that would become Macsteel’s future headquarters. By 1974, he’d bought out his partners and became the company’s sole owner.
