Trencor, one of the most successful and adaptable family businesses in South Africa, will shuffle off the JSE next month. It’s been an incredible 70 years on the JSE for the Jowell family-controlled company. Not many companies can boast of going from a dusty little Namaqualand town to the glitz of the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE).
For Trencor, it’s always been about mobility. The group set up as a motor dealership in Springbok during the Great Depression, but soon capitalised on opportunities in regional transport by converting one of its vehicles into a truck.
Over the decades Trencor managed to adapt to changing economic circumstances — taking in trailer manufacturing with Henred Fruehauf, tyres and then, famously, container manufacturing in the late 1970s.
Container manufacturing gave Trencor huge rand hedge appeal, and the group was one of the most popular JSE stocks throughout the 1980s and early 1990s.
By the late 1990s, increased competition from China in container manufacturing rendered local production unviable, and Trencor’s container manufacturing operations were all closed down by 2024.
Fortunately, Trencor had, in 1980, made a fortuitous investment in a small container leasing business — later to become Textainer and a powerhouse player in the international container leasing sector with a listing on the NYSE. Textainer was later unbundled to Trencor shareholders and in 2023 it was bought out by alternative investment firm Stonepeak in a $7.4bn deal.
There might have been hopes that Trencor — which had functioned as a dollar-denominated cash shell over the past few years — had one more operational iteration up its sleeve. Sadly not. The leftover cash is being distributed to shareholders and Trencor’s JSE listing will be terminated on July 22.
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