Shanghai Zendai Property plans to transform a Johannesburg suburb into the “New York of Africa” with an 80 billion rand ($7.8 billion) investment over the next 15 years

November 5, 2013 Leave a comment

Shanghai Zendai Plans $7.8 Billion ‘New York of Africa’

Shanghai Zendai Property Ltd. (755) plans to transform a Johannesburg suburb into the “New York of Africa” with an 80 billion rand ($7.8 billion) investment over the next 15 years, Chairman Dai Zhikang said. The company, based in Hong Kong, will build a financial hub, as many as 35,000 houses, an educational center and a sport stadium in the 1,600 hectares (3,950 acres) of land it purchased from AECI Ltd. (AFE) in Modderfontein, eastern Johannesburg. The area, currently used for manufacturing, is about 15 kilometers (9 miles) east of Sandton, the city’s main financial center, and the same distance west of OR Tambo International Airport, Africa’s biggest airport.“It will become the future capital of the whole of Africa,” Dai said at a press conference today, speaking through a translator. “This will be on par with cities like New York in America or Hong Kong in the Far East.”

The development, which is yet to be named, will become a hub for Chinese firms investing in sub-Saharan Africa, Dai said. While Johannesburg already offers a base for companies investing in Africa, the city hasn’t got enough space to cater for the growing demand for offices and homes, he said.

The Chinese developer paid AECI 1.06 billion rand for the land, it said in a statement yesterday. The area is home to an explosives factory that opened in 1896 to support the gold-mining industry. It includes a wetlands area that will be protected, and could be the equivalent of Central Park in New York, Dai said.

Shanghai Zendai will invest its own money in the project and work with other developers, Zhikang said. Once complete, the city will provide jobs for 100,000 people and house about 100,000 more.

“Those cities we just mentioned they were there for 100 years,” Dai said. “We’re talking about the next 100 years.”

To contact the reporter on this story: Kevin Crowley in Johannesburg at kcrowley1@bloomberg.net

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Kee Koon Boon (“KB”) is the co-founder and director of HERO Investment Management which provides specialized fund management and investment advisory services to the ARCHEA Asia HERO Innovators Fund (www.heroinnovator.com), the only Asian SMID-cap tech-focused fund in the industry. KB is an internationally featured investor rooted in the principles of value investing for over a decade as a fund manager and analyst in the Asian capital markets who started his career at a boutique hedge fund in Singapore where he was with the firm since 2002 and was also part of the core investment committee in significantly outperforming the index in the 10-year-plus-old flagship Asian fund. He was also the portfolio manager for Asia-Pacific equities at Korea’s largest mutual fund company. Prior to setting up the H.E.R.O. Innovators Fund, KB was the Chief Investment Officer & CEO of a Singapore Registered Fund Management Company (RFMC) where he is responsible for listed Asian equity investments. KB had taught accounting at the Singapore Management University (SMU) as a faculty member and also pioneered the 15-week course on Accounting Fraud in Asia as an official module at SMU. KB remains grateful and honored to be invited by Singapore’s financial regulator Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) to present to their top management team about implementing a world’s first fact-based forward-looking fraud detection framework to bring about benefits for the capital markets in Singapore and for the public and investment community. KB also served the community in sharing his insights in writing articles about value investing and corporate governance in the media that include Business Times, Straits Times, Jakarta Post, Manual of Ideas, Investopedia, TedXWallStreet. He had also presented in top investment, banking and finance conferences in America, Italy, Sydney, Cape Town, HK, China. He has trained CEOs, entrepreneurs, CFOs, management executives in business strategy & business model innovation in Singapore, HK and China.

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