Urban myths exist in every sector. Take the January Indicator, a Wall Street chestnut devised in the 1970s by Yale Hirsch which posits that market performance in January foretells the direction stocks will take for the year.
There’s the one about the mile high club. Or as legend has it — you get drunk faster at cruising altitude, and not switching off your cellphone before take-off and landing interferes with the plane’s navigation equipment.
The retail unicorn then, is the Nando’s “Black Card”. Andy Murray is said to have one, as is David Beckham and even David Cameron. It grants the owner an unearned privilege of unlimited free peri-peri chicken for themselves and five friends (for life).
On a scale of 1 to Elon Musk, the brand is one of our top exports
Bar hushed tones, there is little proof of said card’s authenticity. Robbie Brozin, co-founder of the fast food chain, neither confirms nor denies its existence. “I haven’t got one. It’s about time they gave me one. If it does exist, I’d like one,” Brozin once told the Financial Times, adding, “It’s a rumour, I believe ...” There’s another Nando’s rumour doing the rounds — it’s been looking at capital raising options, with a London listing among one of the potential considerations. As expected, the privately owned company has denied it — a sign that talks are still in the early stages (and that someone couldn’t keep their mouth shut).
A London flotation makes sense, there’s the access to a deeper pool of capital and the currency hedge thing, given our floppy rand. Also, a lot of Nando’s value sits in the UK. It’s a notoriously difficult market as far as food service goes.
Nando’s actually struggled when it first opened, but the UK fast became one of its top three markets in terms of sales following a shift years back from cookie-cutter expansion to a more individualised design of each outlet. Nando’s also has a booming grocery business, supplying products like sauces, potato chips and rubs to UK supermarkets Tesco and Sainsbury’s. With its cheeky ads it has become something of an institution in the UK — just watch the Nando’s episode from English comedian Jack Whitehall’s Live at the Apollo series.
On a scale of 1 to Elon Musk, the brand is one of our top exports. If ever you are homesick, know that it has more than 1,000 outlets in about 30 countries (Fiji, I mean, c’mon).
Here’s the quick and dirty on Nando’s: Brozin, while working as an (unhappy) accountant was taken by his friend Fernando “Nando” Duarte to a small café at the corner of Main and Ferreira streets in Rosettenville, Johannesburg South. There they ate traditional Portuguese-style chicken. The pair ended up buying the café called Chickenland (for R80,000) and converting it into Nando’s. This was in 1987. Their vision (in their own words) was to have fun and make money, while changing the world one chicken at a time.
The company’s first backer was billionaire insurance magnate Dick Enthoven. It listed on the JSE in 1997 (amid a listing boom), but left the bourse in April 2003 — its share was struggling and, if you remember, a slew of stringent listing requirements was about to come into effect. That essentially meant that the cost of maintaining a listing outweighed the benefits for many companies — at least 88 companies delisted from the JSE in 2002 alone. At one stage, rumours even surfaced that Yum Brands (KFC, Pizza Hut, Taco Bell) was poised to buy Nando’s. Anyway, roughly two thirds of Nando’s stores are franchised and the remaining are company owned.
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