Omnia starts final listed year with a bang as shareholders approve R21bn cash buyout

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JIMMY MOYAHA: Omnia Holdings Limited released interim results for the six months ended 30 September 2026 at 07:05 this morning.

Read: Omnia hits a seven-year high on JSE Dividend bonanza for Omnia shareholders

The business saw an increase in revenues north of the R11 billion mark. Operating profits were up 26%, and the operating margin from the business’s perspective increased from just under 10% to more than 20% from a business perspective.

The business is clearly having a strong start to the financial year, and we’re going to take a closer look at that start with the company’s group chief executive officer, Seelan Gobalsamy. He joins me on the line now to see what we make of their performance.

Seelan, always lovely having you on the show. Thanks so much for taking the time. What a start to the financial year! Take us through how you and the team are seeing the numbers.

SEELAN GOBALSAMY: Thank you, Jimmy – and always good to speak to you and to your listeners. This is our half-year result.

I guess what you’re seeing is that Omnia continues to deliver a strong operating result, strong execution of our strategy – and in essence our revenue is up 2% to R11.4 billion.

That could have been better. I think our farmers both locally and in SADC have made slower buying decisions based on El Niño and the rain coming a little later.

Read: Will El Niño drought hit food prices in South Africa?

Rain has come, so they have made those decisions now.

But even with that our business delivered a 26% increase in profit – R1.1 billion across agriculture and mining.

And then our Ebitda [earnings before interest, tax, depreciation, and amortisation] up 21% to R1.4 billion.

A strong cash position again, a positive cash balance, and a large investment that we’ve made in working capital to ensure that our farmers and our mines have redundancy of supply, fertiliser and explosives in times of great geopolitical and supply-chain disruption.

So a strong performance and we are pleased with how we’ve performed in the six months.

JIMMY MOYAHA: Seelan, I want to take a closer look at that split in performance across the portfolios – the two predominant portfolios you mentioned, of course, the agriculture segment and the mining portfolio.

The revenues are almost split down the middle between how they contribute towards the business. It’s nice to be able to see operating profits on both portfolios increasing in double digits.

How are you seeing that balance between having that split in terms of focus areas? It looks like it’s benefitting the business from a diversification perspective.

SEELAN GOBALSAMY: Yes. What you’re touching on now is the strength of Omnia. What we do have is the ability to optimise between agriculture and mining, and we’ve done that over the years.

So if you look at the last seven, eight years of our results, there’ll be various times when agri does better than mining, and mining does better than agri.

In this result our mining business has delivered more profit than agri, but there are times where the agri business delivers more.

I think this ability to optimise across our portfolio – to optimise not only in South Africa but in Africa and across the world – is really what’s resulted in the sustainable earnings growth at Omnia.

Obviously, shareholders have seen that, and that has resulted in this buyout offer that we are busy working on at the moment.

JIMMY MOYAHA: Seelan, we’ll get to that buyout offer in a second. I want to look at the baby of the family, so that the baby doesn’t feel left out – that chemicals business, that R610 million-odd worth of revenue in this particular period, this first half of the new financial year, with operating margins improving, operating profits increasing quite significantly. What’s happening in that business?

SEELAN GOBALSAMY: Thank you for that, Jimmy.

I’m particularly proud to say that the chemicals business for the last three half-years didn’t make money – it lost money in the last two; we had to make some changes there; we had to take some very difficult medicine, which we did – and that business delivered R97 million worth of profit in the first half of the year.

That then adds to Omnia’s result; it mitigates some of the slow performance we’ve seen in the agri sector, which is in a tough space.

What it shows is the disciplined execution of our management team. Our management team, when they set their sights on something, put their heads down and go out and deliver it. So I’m very pleased with that performance.

A part of that business is held for sale, and we will continue to look at finding the right shareholder for that business.

But it’s good to see that the business is performing well and the profits that we anticipated getting out of it a few years ago when we started restructuring are coming through well.

JIMMY MOYAHA: Seelan, let’s talk about that buyout offer that you teased about; the market has been eagerly anticipating more information around it: a R21-odd billion, all-cash buyout offer from Solar Industries India [Solar Group].

Read: Omnia in advanced talks over potential buyout of all its ordinary shares [Sep 2026] Omnia receives R21.8bn buyout bid from Solar Industries [Sep 2026]

That is clearly a very positive sign for the Omnia business, [and it’s] very sad that we might lose Omnia once the business becomes delisted. We understand, of course, that there was a vote on Friday regarding the approval or acceptance of that offer.

Take us through what we can discuss around that. I know it’s still very sensitive at this stage and we might not be able to get to all the mechanics, but it is still a very impressive offer for the business.

SEELAN GOBALSAMY: Yes, I think if we step back, Jimmy, and look at the market cap since our rights issue, our lowest market cap was about R2 billion when we did our rights issue.

Our share price at that point was around R20. What we’ve seen is strong growth in the underlying value propositions of the company.

We were trading at roughly R99 when we announced the deal, or just before we announced the deal, and Solar made our shareholders a R134.50 [share] all-cash offer for the business.

We thought that was something really important to look at, and the board then recommended that shareholders do the transaction.

As you say, Omnia’s been on the JSE for a number of years, and it’s sad that it results in a delisting.

But I think what keeps my head up is that it demonstrates Solar’s commitment to South Africa, to Africa, to Omnia and BME [Blasting Solutions], our value propositions, our customer propositions and our staff.

Really the intent is to continue the Omnia growth story, to continue to build the business, expand the business across the world in partnership with Solar, with Solar shareholders and the Solar balance sheet. So a 30%-odd increase in price at that time.

Where we are now is a highly regulated process and shareholders voted last Friday. We received 99.9% approval.

The next step is to complete all the regulatory loops. What we said today is we anticipate having the transaction closed in the second quarter of next year – and at that point we will delist.

But delisting doesn’t mean that we don’t continue the positive impact.

So I don’t think it will be the last discussion we have, and certainly our farmers and mines will continue to see Omnia delivering and making a positive impact in the societies, the countries and with the customers and suppliers and partners with whom we do business..

JIMMY MOYAHA: A bittersweet start to the new financial year. This is potentially one of the last conversations we’re going to have with the team at Omnia, because the business is doing so well that somebody else wants a piece of it.

We’ll have to leave this conversation on that note.

Omnia Holdings Limited chief executive officer, Seelan Gobalsamy, joined us to take a look at the strong start to the new financial year, as well as the buyout offer that the business is currently in the process of dealing with.

‘Delisting doesn’t mean we don’t continue the positive impact – the intent is to continue the Omnia growth story across the world in partnership with Solar’: Group CEO Seelan Gobalsamy.