Patrice Motsepe (40) is one of the most successful of the new breed of black SA mining entrepreneurs.
In just eight years, since leaving legal firm Bowman Gilfillan in 1994, he has established African Rainbow Minerals (ARM) as the 12th-largest gold producer in the world, with an annual output of about 33,6 t.
He became a rand billionaire following the listing of ARM's gold assets on the JSE Securities Exchange in May this year as ARMgold. Various Motsepe family trusts own a total of 55,8% of ARMgold, which has a current market capitalisation of nearly R7bn.
Motsepe, who holds a BA from Swaziland University and an LLB from Wits University, was a partner at Bowman Gilfillan, where he specialised in mining and business law.
When he left in 1994, he founded a contract mining operation called Future Mining which provided various services to the then Vaal Reefs gold mine, now part of AngloGold.
That put him in the right place at the right time to benefit from the restructuring of the SA gold mining industry. Major SA gold groups like AngloGold were being forced to restructure their operations to survive an extended downturn in the gold price. Part of the solution was to dispose of marginal shafts - those which were high-cost or had a short life - to focus on the remaining low-cost, long-life shafts.
Motsepe acquired a number of marginal shafts at Vaal Reefs in January 1998 on favourable financial terms. He followed that with the purchase of other marginal shafts owned by AngloGold in the Free State.
The challenge was then to turn them around through tighter cost control and better working efficiencies.
Statistics published ahead of the listing of ARMgold this year show a consistent trend of rising gold output and good cost control from these operations in the three years to June 2001.
Motsepe's leap into the major gold league came when ARMgold and Harmony teamed up in a 50-50 joint venture to buy Freegold from AngloGold for R2,2bn in January this year.
This gave ARMgold a 50% stake in some long-life gold assets and pushed the group into the annual production league of more than 1m oz. At this point institutional investors start to take notice. The listing of ARMgold followed, along with a strategic agreement with Harmony over the future of the partnership.
With Motsepe's business success has come broader corporate exposure and responsibility. He held the position of vice-president of the Chamber of Mines for two years and is now president of the National African Chamber of Commerce & Industry (Nafcoc).
Still privately held and unlisted at this stage is ARM's 50% stake in the new Maandagshoek platinum mine being developed by Anglo American Platinum, a project likely to be worth far more than the R1,35bn development cost.
If there's a criticism of Motsepe, it's that voiced by some of his mining competitors who may well have axes to grind.
They feel he has kept back more than his fair share of the benefits from developments driven by black economic empowerment.
"Patrice actually needs an empowerment partner," says one.
