There are South African corporate origin stories, and then there is Belron.
The world’s largest windscreen repair and replacement company is preparing for what could become one of Europe’s biggest IPOs in years, with Amsterdam the preferred venue and a valuation north of €30bn being discussed.
The interesting part is where the whole thing began over 100 years ago: in the mining town streets of Jeppestown in Joburg, with a wheelbarrow and some chutzpah.
Morrie Lubner joined Plate Glass in the early 1920s, building its Joburg operation after starting out by pushing glass around town and selling it to furniture makers and building merchants. The original business dated back to Cape Town in 1897, but the Transvaal operation eventually became large enough for Morrie to take equity control.
Then came Morrie’s sons, Bertie and Ronnie.
Bertie concentrated largely on timber, while Ronnie was the glass man and consummate dealmaker. He joined as a clerk in 1952 and 10 years later persuaded his father to buy the much larger Express Glass after spotting a management dispute there. It was audacious and risky — something of a Ronnie Lubner speciality.
International expansion began with Australia’s O’Brien Glass in 1971. Then, in the mid-1980s, Ronnie paid £1m for a loss-making British windscreen company despite being advised not to. His investment thesis was gloriously un-CFA-and-corporate-MBA-like. Legend has it that he simply liked the MD. That business became Autoglass, and one of the foundations of the empire.
The global ambitions eventually created a branding problem. PG in South Africa had become Autoglass in Britain, Carglass in Europe, O’Brien in Australia and Windshields in the US.
Jeremy Sampson, now better known as the Brandfather, was working with Ronnie in London and remembers sitting with him in a box at Twickenham in the late 1980s. “I didn’t see the kick-off because Ronnie and I were looking at the TV in the back of the box to see how much exposure his brands were getting.”
The answer was: not enough. Nobody was connecting the various businesses. Afterwards, Sampson recalls, Ronnie wanted an umbrella brand. Two months of trying to find something registrable eventually produced a typical Lubner solution. Ronnie took Bella, his mother’s name, added Ronnie, and Belron was born.
Two years later, in 1992, South African Breweries bought the business. Then, in 1999, Belgian group D’Ieteren acquired Belron (the Belgian conglomerate today owns 50.3%), and Ronnie’s son Gary took over as CEO in 2000.
Gary would run it for more than two decades, adding Safelite in the US in 2007. Today Belron operates in more than 40 countries and employs about 32,000 people.
Succession
Which brings another South African corporate ghost into the room.
Gary was succeeded in 2023 by Carlos Brito, the Brazilian former AB InBev boss who masterminded the $100bn-plus takeover of SABMiller.
Anyone who lived through that episode will remember that Brito arrived with a reputation that made Australian cricket team sandpaper look like cottonwool. He was a formidable operator and an almost evangelical cost-cutter. Former SAB executives were considerably less enthusiastic about the culture that followed AB InBev through the door. The FM later described how management layers were gutted and suppliers squeezed as Brito attacked costs after the acquisition.
Brito left AB InBev in 2021. That same year, Belron underwent a major change in its shareholder base. Hellman & Friedman, BlackRock Private Equity Partners and GIC came in at a transaction value of €21bn, alongside D’Ieteren and CD&R. Suddenly you had an extraordinarily valuable privately held company, half-owned by a listed Belgian investment group and surrounded by heavyweight financial investors who would eventually need to find the exits.
Gary Lubner, after 22 years as CEO, was preparing his succession. Lubner has since told Bruce Whitfield that Brito initially did not seem the most natural successor, arriving after more than two decades of Lubner stewardship. What changed the equation was the cultural fit, but also something strategically significant: Brito knew how to run a listed global company.
Belron is a fascinating company. Windscreens used to be ordinary sheets of glass. Increasingly they are platforms for cameras, sensors, coatings and advanced driver-assistance systems. Replace one and you may also have to recalibrate the car’s electronics. The humble chipped windscreen has become a higher-value technical service. Meanwhile, much of the demand is insurance-backed and relatively insensitive to whether consumers are feeling cheerful about the state of the economy.
The numbers show why investors are interested. First-half sales were €3.57bn and adjusted pre-tax profit rose 29% to €612.7m.
There is, however, a sizeable crack when it comes to the balance sheet. Belron ended June with €8.34bn of net debt and senior-secured leverage of 4.3 times, much of it following the extraordinary 2024 refinancing used to fund a multibillion-euro distribution to shareholders as the Lubners sought to take chips off the table.
A business whose origins lie with a young Morrie Lubner pushing glass around Joburg may soon carry a public-market valuation exceeding €30bn, with a potential IPO bringing the story full circle.
Ronnie, who once bought a struggling British windscreen operation largely because he liked the bloke running it, would probably have enjoyed that.
A crack in the windscreen, indeed.
