Integrity Counts

Vimal Shah, CEO of east African FMCG giant Bidco, has built a household name by matching business sense and commitment with firm ethics. He explains his vision to Alison Lock, Africa Investors.

It isn’t an easy time to be doing business in Kenya at the moment, but Vimal Shah, founder and head of the Bidco empire, has weathered a few storms in his time. "It’s a phase we have to go through and it’s good to learn from," he says stoically of the current political upheaval.

"These are our peak months, but they’ve been the opposite," he says. "It’s disrupted the distribution systems and the way people work, and in Uganda we’re down by about 50% from normal levels."

It was a similar story 15 years ago, during the 1992 multiparty elections in Kenya, when his small consumer goods company, producing and selling edible oils, fats, soaps and margarines was in its crucial expansion stage.

"It was a very tough period for us when we started off. Interest rates went from 15% to 80% per annum. The exchange rate was also very high, worse than it is at the moment in Kenya, it was very hard to operate. Lots of companies didn’t make it."

Bidco did survive, however, and has since grown from an idea conceived out of his father’s textile business into a household name with production plants in Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania distributing 26 brands across 14 countries. Shah’s ambitions for his business now stretch continent-wide: "Africa’s per capita consumption is very low. It can only go up. We have a goal - 2030 - by which time we want to be all over Africa in this industry."

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