The young upstart who launched the FM in 1959 will take considerable pride in celebrating the magazine’s 60th anniversary.
Henri Kuiper, now 95 years old and retired to the seaside resort town of Hermanus, recalls the events that led up to the launching of SA’s most authoritative and enduring business publication. The proposal for the FM was first mooted by legendary Rand Daily Mail editor Laurence Gandar, who was then a PR officer for Anglo American.
While many at the time would have believed the SA market was too small to accommodate a specialist business magazine, Kuiper, then MD of SA Associated Newspapers (Saan), strongly backed Gandar’s bold idea.
"I believed there was a lack of an SA counterpart to the UK’s top business magazine, The Economist," he says.
Kuiper remembers there was initially some resistance. "But I would not be dissuaded, and I prepared a report with profit predictions of an SA magazine that was an equivalent to The Economist … based on initial circulation of around 4,000 readers."
Kuiper then went to London to find partners for the new venture. He was only 35 at the time, but was regarded as a bit of a whizz-kid after managing to quickly shape up a faltering Saan.
He says he talked his way into the office of The Economist editor Sir Geoffrey Crowther. Fortunately, the reaction from Crowther to the concept of the FM was encouraging — probably helped by the fact that a similar magazine was being contemplated for the Australian market at the time.
The Financial Times, the owner of The Economist, offered to take a 50% stake in a new company that would wholly own the FM. The other shareholders would be Saan (a forerunner to Times Media Limited and Tiso Blackstar) with a 40% stake — and Gandar and Kuiper, who each secured a 5% stake in the new company. Kuiper says when the time came to sell out of the FM’s holding company both received a "five-figure sum" for their shares.
The FM became fully owned by Saan in the mid-1970s when the Financial Times sold its stake for R180,000. In the 1990s the Financial Times once again owned part of the FM when its holding company Pearson took a 50% stake in BDFM (Business Day and Financial Mail) along with Times Media.
The Financial Times also provided a first editor for the FM — John Marvin, a respected journalist with 30 years’ experience, who had served as deputy editor of The Economist. He agreed to relocate to SA for five years.
With Marvin unfamiliar with the SA economy and political landscape, Kuiper was quick to seek out a South African deputy editor and appointed George Palmer in this role. Palmer took over as FM editor when Marvin retired just two years after the magazine’s launch.
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While Marvin set the FM’s authoritative tone, it was Palmer who built the magazine’s reputation in the next decade.
Kuiper describes Palmer as "charismatic, articulate and lavishly extroverted".
He says Palmer proved to be a highly respected financial journalist — despite being described by then prime minister John Vorster as an "enemy of the state".
"Palmer taught an entire generation of financial journalists to leave their political affiliations at home — focus instead on giving impartial and objective comments on SA business," says Kuiper.
He says it was gratifying when the FM quickly justified his and Gandar’s contention that there was a gap in the market for a quality business weekly.
It was a particular relief when they confirmed there was adequate readership for the FM. "The advertising potential was not as big a concern as we had the backing of Anglo American, which represented a chunk of the SA economy and held huge advertising spend. And Gandar had discussed the FM proposal with Harry Oppenheimer.
"The FM, in fact, started very well, and it did not take long to get to the circulation numbers that we needed. A sustained volume of advertising also meant the publication was successful at the start."
After a rewarding tenure at Saan, Kuiper went on to an illustrious business career — including stints as a merchant banker at CitiBank and serving on the boards of Standard Bank and retail conglomerate Wooltru.
"I still count the launch of the FM as one of the best things I ever did," he says. "I think it still makes a significant contribution to the country, and I hope the FM continues successfully."
• Hasenfuss is a longtime reporter for the FM as well as the editor of Investors Monthly
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