A decade of dealmaking: Investec Pan Africa Conference continues to shape investment across the continent
Andrew Schultz, head of Frontier Markets, highlights the opportunities emerging from the 2025 Investec Pan Africa Conference, connecting African corporates and global investors, facilitating high-value investment opportunities
The dimming of the US exceptionalism story that has seen investor capital flow into the world’s biggest market for the last decade has driven a shift in investment flows, with emerging and frontier markets benefiting from this global realignment.
Select emerging and frontier markets have drawn interest from asset allocators by offering attractive valuations and favourable growth dynamics due to strengthening fundamentals and a weaker US dollar.
Africa rising
After a long period of outperformance by frontier markets across Asia, we have witnessed a shift in the last 18 months, with Africa emerging as a region brimming with potential for substantial returns from the right investments – the region (ex-SA) was up 28% over the last year while frontier Asia was only up 2.6%.
The weaker US dollar is providing strong tailwinds for frontier Africa. Countries on the continent, including Egypt, Nigeria and Kenya, have also seen a stabilisation in high-level themes, with foreign exchange regimes and flows normalising, alongside improving national reserves and falling inflation, which supports the continued improvement in the credit quality of these countries.
Strong earnings and dividend growth in underlying companies in recent years, resulted in numerous opportunities to enter these markets at attractive valuations.
Lower oil prices are also benefiting inflation, improving the balance of payments on imports, and fuelling economic growth in net-importer countries like Morocco and Kenya.
Furthermore, as global debt markets have opened up again, we have seen better liquidity in numerous African markets, adding to the improved fundamentals that have made these environments more attractive to global investors.
Connecting corporates and investors
Against this backdrop, Investec hosted the annual Pan Africa Conference, which took place on 14-15 May 2025 in Cape Town.
First held in 2016, the conference covers markets across the continent and diverse sectors, from telecoms and energy to financial services, fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG), infrastructure development and healthcare.
Blue chip corporates invited to attend include:
- East African Breweries PLC (EABL)
- CFG Bank
- Panoro Energy
- Rubis
- Marsa Maroc
- Label Vie
- Orascom Construction
- Safaricom PLC
- Egypt Kuwait Holding Co SAE
- CAB Payments
- Akdital Holding
- Co-operative Bank of Kenya
Investment themes
Sentiment at the 2025 event was extremely positive, with C-suite executives bullish on the opportunities and improved capital availability supportive of robust dealmaking in this strategic growth region.
Key themes to emerge from the discussions included:
- The Morocco opportunity: The country’s stable economy stands to benefit from incredible tailwinds, including the co-hosting of the 2030 FIFA World Cup with Spain and Portugal, which will drive huge infrastructure spending in a low-inflation environment.
- Financial services: The African burgeoning fintech sector and supportive conditions for the broader financial services sector offer high return on equity (RoE) at attractive price-to-book multiples.
- Telecoms: Fintech-driven innovation in the mobile money space and a shift to a more supportive regulatory environment that allows mobile operators to increase tariffs will boost growth, with numerous IPO spinouts ahead to unlock investor value.
- Energy: While renewable energy remains a buzzword in Africa, electrification is the more prolific trend, offering investment opportunities in supporting the infrastructure projects needed to connect more Africans to the grid. Extracting value from Africa’s mineral resource endowment, like the massive oil and gas reserves discovered recently off the West Coast of Namibia, will require significant investment for the requisite infrastructure and skills.
Facilitating dealmaking
The Pan-Africa Conference serves as an important platform to connect global fund managers focused on Africa (excluding South Africa) with C-suite executives from leading corporations across various African countries to ensure the continent and global investors can capitalise on these opportunities.
The event facilitates meaningful engagements between investors and corporates, leveraging a mix of one-on-one, small group and online meetings to catalyse high-value investment opportunities on the continent. The Investec Institutional and Corporate Banking (CIB) team was on hand to provide advisory, investor engagement, market access, fundraising, and equity capital market (ECM) services to the firms in attendance focused on the region.
As a top-tier broker across all African markets, with deep local knowledge and contacts across the investment universe, the Investec CIB frontier markets team also gives institutional investors access to these blue-chip companies focused on the continent, regardless of where they are listed.
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