Author: Harry Scherzer

In the final quarter of 2025, South Africa received R41.3 billion in foreign direct investment (FDI). That investment went everywhere from small startups (US$643 million across 85 deals) to major enterprises (Coca-Cola HBC’s US$2.6 billion acquisition of a 75% stake in Coca-Cola Beverages Africa being among the largest). While we have plenty of stories of entrepreneurs and organisations hustling to get international investment, what many don’t realise is that the real hard work begins once you’ve got the investment. In part, that’s because international investments are a lot more complex than they’re made out to be. There are, for example,…

Many South Africans have viewed offshore investment as an informal insurance policy to protect their wealth, so they would move their money abroad, buy into the S&P 500 or a global tech fund, and wait for market returns plus a weakening rand to do the rest. For a long time, that delivered easy wins. Today, not so much. With surging geopolitical conflict, fluctuating interest-rate expectations and a more complicated domestic fiscal picture, relying on offshore equity and the rand to do the heavy lifting leaves too much to chance. Even a 10% dollar return means little if you lose 2-3%…

It’s no secret that the rand is incredibly volatile. Anyone who listens to the currency reports at the end of a news bulletin knows how big the swings (mostly in the wrong direction) any time there’s a major economic event at home and abroad. In fact, an IMF report found that, between 2010 and 2019, the only currencies that were more volatile were the Russian Rouble and Argentinian Peso. More recently, it was calculated that there was a 37% fluctuation in the currency’s value against the US dollar between February 2022 and February 2023. Those fluctuations aren’t just interesting footnotes at the end of…