Growth-hungry Lesaka inks R507m deal for prepaid electricity firm Recharger

The acquisition follows a series of deals this year, notably its acquisition of payments technology firm Adumo with effect from October, which comes as the group looks to establish itself as Southern Africa's largest fintech group.

Recharger is a electricity submetering and payments business with a base of over 460 000 registered meters. Recharger enables landlords to collect payment for utilities usage from tenants in advance, eliminating the need to manage billing and collections, the group said. This model further provides tenants with the ability to manage their utility usage and payments directly, providing them with greater control over costs.

Lesaka expects the acquisition to act as an entry point into the SA private utilities space while augmenting its alternative payment offering to businesses.

The group said it expects the transaction to concluded by the end of March.

Lesaka, which is valued at about R7 billion publicly, rebranded from Net1 UEPS in 2022 when it acquired Connect Group for R3.8 billion. This was a transformative acquisition aimed at helping it build a fintech platform that will offer financial services and payment processing to both consumers and merchants across the formal and informal sectors in southern Africa.

It offers transactional accounts (banking), insurance, lending and payments solutions for historically underserviced consumers, as well as micro-merchants and merchants. Its GAAP business is the biggest provider of point-of-sale technology to SA's hospitality industry.

It announced in September it had agreed to acquire Adumo for R1.59 billion in a cash-and-share deal that brought in Patrice Motsepe's African Rainbow Capital as an investor.

Earlier in the year, it also reached a deal to acquire Heineken International's Touchsides, which is a leading data analytics, insights and merchant services company, and which has expanded its footprint in SA taverns.

Shares of Lesaka were unchanged on Wednesday morning and have risen by almost a fifth in the past year.