It’s been about a dozen years since former trade union stalwart Marcel Golding split up with his comrade Johnny Copelyn at diversified holding company Hosken Consolidated Investments (HCI), the investment business they resuscitated in the mid-1990s.
Copelyn — perhaps thanks to an adventurous tilt into oil and gas — still commands a huge presence in the financial media. Golding, on the other hand, has stayed low-key and has routinely (in this journalist’s experience) declined interview requests.
It’s not as if he has vanished entirely from view. It was about 10 years ago that he emerged as the prime mover at Rex Trueform and its pyramid holding company, African & Overseas Enterprises. At the time, Rextru was best known as a fashion retailing specialist through its Queenspark chain.
A fair bit has changed since, most notably the group’s reshaping into a diversified investment company, though it would be an unnecessarily crude exercise to draw parallels with the considerably larger HCI.
For one thing, Rextru, despite issuing new shares to vendors of various acquired businesses, is frustratingly illiquid, with practically no institutional investor participation or interest from boutique asset managers (if we rule out former asset manager Hugh Roberts, a long-standing large shareholder in Rextru). Matters are made worse by an archaic N share control structure, which stretches even into African & Overseas Enterprises.
Interestingly, Golding, while arguing that there remains considerable opportunity in the existing portfolio, says Rextru will also consider new investments. “Our objective is not simply to become larger. It is to build a stronger collection of businesses capable of generating sustainable returns for shareholders.”
It should be noted that Rextru’s property division has already turned into a fine little profit hub; Golding notes that the segment “continued to provide stable earnings during the year”. In the 20206 financial year, rental income from the R700m portfolio increased to R68.9m (2025: R61.5m), with strong occupancy levels. Capacity to build out the property segment further looks restricted in the short term, but it should add decent cash flow for the foreseeable future.
What is apparent, though, is a new dynamism at Queenspark, which operates a 64-store chain with a strong focus on womenswear. Golding highlights a strong second half in financial 2026, “bucking market trends”. Rextru’s annual report shows Queenspark bumping up revenue to R674.2m (2025: R663m), with gross profit and operating profit both higher at R372.5m and R49m respectively (previously R263m and R39m).
Golding says Queenspark focused on a leaner operating model to improve sustainability and profitability, adding that initiatives to contain store rentals through tough negotiations and rightsizing of stores have been successful.
There has been success on the online sales side too. Golding says that despite Queenspark’s online platform contributing a small percentage of turnover, digital sales were effectively the retail company’s sixth most profitable store. “We have embarked on an exciting rebuild of the website to further catapult our online platform growth.”
The resilience of Rextru’s retail operations does present the gentlest of quandaries. Reliable cash flows will oil the dealmaking wheels, though the scale of any acquisitions will be fairly limited if the group does not want to stretch the balance sheet. That would probably entail building on existing interests rather than venturing into new operating silos.
While fashion retailing has teetered off the profit ramp of late, would there be any interest from larger retail entities to acquire and more aggressively extend the profitable niche market share that Queenspark offers? A sale would cash up Rextru and allow it to pursue new investments. But with Rextru’s other investments still at fledgling stage, it would need a premium price tag for the group to let go of its crown jewel. And that’s highly unlikely at this juncture.
