Whitey Basson

Supermarkets. Basson ran Shoprite from 1979, when it had eight stores, until 2016, and from the 1990s took it into more than a dozen African countries. The hard part was logistics: trucking goods from South Africa across borders, building local supply where possible, and dealing with currency controls. Shoprite later withdrew from several markets, including Nigeria and Kenya, showing the limits of the model.