Meikles is to separately list its subsidiary Tanganda, as the group sharpens its focus on agriculture after selling a key part of its hotels business last year.
Advisors on the transaction have been engaged and the proposal to split the company will soon be put to shareholders, Meikles says in a notice.
“In this regard, the Directors have determined to unbundle from the company and separately list on the Zimbabwe Stock Exchange the company’s agricultural processing business, Tanganda Tea Estates,” the company said.
The remaining Meikles business will retain the tourism interests – it still co-runs the Victoria Falls Hotel with African Sun – as well as the retail arm, Pick n Pay and TM. Both the hotel unit and supermarkets have been hit by the impact of COVID-19 over the past year.
Meikles has been reinventing itself after it sold its flagship Meikles Hotel to Dubai’s Albwardy for US$20 million in February last year. With cash in the bank after that sale, Meikles Limited is refocusing strategy on growing its farm exports.
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Tanganda runs five estates covering 2,600 hectares of tea. But it has moved beyond tea to increase production of other crops such as avocado and macadamia, both in high demand abroad.
Meikles’ Tanganda plan will see the company expand exports of packed tea, increase production of avocados, coffee and macadamia nuts, and install 7.5MW of solar energy to provide power to its estates and factory.
Tanganda has installed a 1.8MW solar plant at its main tea estate, Ratelshoek in Chipinge, and is completing two more solar power plants; Tingamira’s 1.6MW and Jersey’s 2MW plants.
The Tanganda listing provides rare activity for the ZSE. The exchange has suffered a number of departures, including a notable exit by Powerspeed, which said “a listing on the ZSE has very little benefit and considerable costs”.
The last real new listing was in 2016, when GetBucks entered the market, and that was the first IPO in a decade. Axia listed in 2016 after splitting from Innscor, while Seedco International got a secondary listing in October 2018.
Tanganda was listed separately until it became part of an ill-fated three-way merger with Kingdom and Meikles in 2007.
