The rand may have been one of the world's best-performing currencies for much of the past year, but that has not been enough to get any purely SA company back into the Financial Times Global 500 list. Six years ago, there were four.
Anglo American has ceased to be an SA company and swallowed up its former independently qualifying De Beers Consolidated associate, as well as the smaller Minorco. Sasol and SA Breweries have just sunk, casualties of the weak rand - R4,68/US$1 was the rate used in the 1998 FT Global 500 survey (whose yardstick, unlike the SA Giants ranking, is market capitalisation).
This has pushed SA companies down the world league table, in some cases despite considerable organic growth. Sasol only just crept into the FT Global 500 in 1998, at 484, but it has since expanded in Europe and been granted a listing in New York. Even so, it has been dragged down by the fact that its home base, and still a major source of revenue and profits, is SA.
SA Breweries is a little more complex. It was ranked as high as 402 in the Global 500 in 1998, and though it has since advanced from the world's fourth-biggest brewer to the second-biggest in its present guise of SABMiller, it has also shed most of its once substantial SA nonbeer interests. These were built up when apartheid-induced isolation made domestic diversification the only way to grow. It still features in the FT European Top 500, but it's as low as number 171.
The story is little happier for companies that, though not purely South African, still have strong SA links. The big success story of the past five years is BHP Billiton, created from the nucleus of the nongold assets of the old General Mining group by Brian Gilbertson, first through a merger with the UK's Billiton and then through another with the Australian equivalent of Anglo American, BHP.
It may be some consolation that two of the world's three biggest nonoil resource companies, Anglo American and BHP Billiton, had their origins in SA. BHP Billiton is ranked 88 in the Global 500, Anglo 153, with only another Aussie-UK hybrid, Rio Tinto, between them, at 124.
But both groups' links with SA are becoming more tenuous. When Anglo moved its domicile to London, it said its commitment to SA was undiminished. Months later, it laid off 40% of its Johannesburg head office staff. It remains a big investor in SA, and through its Anglo Platinum subsidiary is still involved in major new projects here .
At Billiton, Gilbertson was recently shafted by the conservative old guard from BHP, who feared a loss of power in a company that has iconic significance down under. Like any global resource company, it cannot ignore SA and is still spending money here, but as at Anglo, the resurgence of the Aussie old boys' gang can only downgrade SA's importance in the scheme of things.
Companies with SA associations feature less prominently even in the European list, and the long-term weakness of the rand is not the only reason. The slump in the luxury goods market has pushed Richemont - ranked as high as 107 of all European companies in 1997 - right out.
And after the death of its guiding spirit, Tiny Rowland, another erstwhile giant, Lonrho, unbundled itself. Its platinum mining offshoot, Lonmin, is now SA's third-biggest platinum producer, but a market cap of R15bn leaves it a minnow by international standards .
Donald Gordon's UK property company, Liberty International, remains a major player. It was at 440 in the 1998 European list and, helped by absorbing its former partly owned subsidiary Capital Shopping Centres, is now at 319.
But other SA companies that tried to hit the international big time have been dismal disappointments. Investec and Old Mutual both overpaid for ambitious US acquisitions, and Dimension Data got its London listing just as the global IT market was about to implode. None of them can blame the rand as the main cause of its problems .
