31 year-old Uganda-born Ashish Thakkar is unarguably one of the leading IT figures in Africa. His business odyssey started when he was 15, he took a $6,000 loan to set up a local office and was into the sales of computer parts.
Recently interviewed on CNN, the 31 year-old whose Mara Group is one of the largest information technology companies in Africa is also into real estate, tourism, manufacturing, etc. He also talked about other businesses.
"Today, we're in 24 countries, of which 19 are in African countries. We have about 7,000 employees in Africa. We're in IT services. It's the same IT company I started a few years ago and we merged it a few years ago. It's been labeled as Africa's largest IT company but I don't know how true it is. We've got an IT company.
We've got a call center business across Africa. We've got a telecom infrastructure company. We've got a corrugated packaging business in East and Central Africa. We're building a paper mill in East Africa. We've got an agricultural project. We're building an Intercontinental hotel, convention center, shopping mall and office park in Uganda. We're building two hotels, shopping mall, office park and hospital in Tanzania.
He continued, "We're pretty active on the real estate side. We're building a glass manufacturing company in Nigeria. For agriculture, we've secured a large piece of land, about 26,000 acres in East Africa. We're looking at potentially going into the power generation industry as well."
