About Us

Agris is a subsidiary of Maris – an investment holding company, committed to responsible, long-term growth in Africa. Maris offers investors unique access to frontier markets across the world’s fastest-growing continent. 

Our hands-on commitment to operational performance gives us the insight and agility required for success in Africa’s most challenging business environments.

Our strategy is to build our diversified portfolio of multi-country businesses across Africa, led by excellent teams operating to international standards.  We take an active approach to managing our portfolio to ensure the best risk-adjusted returns, but our approach is long-term and we are not looking for short term gains through buying and flipping investments. We are not interested in investments that rely on financial engineering for quick gains.

INVESTMENT CRITERIA

Focus on SMEs (<$15m Enterprise Value). These businesses offer the strongest growth potential and benefit most from direct involvement and consolidation into a larger group. 

Focus on proven business models, which do not exist in the countries in which we operate, or are being done poorly.

Focus on high margin businesses. We typically have no debt or very low leverage in our businesses.  We ensure control of our holdings and typically are only interested in controlling stakes.  

OPERATIONAL APPROACH

We enter new markets slowly, building up small exposures.  We then increase our investments over time as we strengthen our networks and manage risk. 

We are intensely focused on operations to deliver significant long term growth of our holdings and the overall group.  We limit local currency exposure, provide back office functions for finance, procurement, governance, E&S reporting and HR across our companies to deliver expertise, controls, consistency and cost reduction through economies of scale.

We develop strong partnerships with business owners and founders, both through the co-founding of businesses and support to existing companies during growth and expansion phases.  We believe strongly in working with business owners/founders to achieve a shared long-term vision. We generally do not “cash out” business owners, but instead structure our transactions to align interests and jointly share in value created together.