BKB turns R6.7bn wool trade into R15.3bn as profit climbs 24,5%

A South African company most consumers have never heard of moved R15.3 billion through the country’s farming economy in the year to 30 June, and lifted its operating profit 24,5% to R332.2 million doing it.

The company is BKB, a Gqeberha agricultural group that traces its origins to a wool cooperative formed in that city in 1919. It runs livestock and wool trading, grain, agricultural retail, fuel, property and financial services, and it sits between farmers and the markets that buy what they produce.

Revenue for the 2025 financial year came to R6.77 billion, which works out at roughly R18.56 million a day. The group has now reported a second year of growth on top of that base.

The numbers behind the year

Profit before tax rose 46,9% to R273 million for the year to 30 June 2026. The value of business transactions handled by the group climbed 11,4% to R15.3 billion.

Headline earnings per share rose 38,2% to 241,3 cents, and basic earnings per share were up 46,4% to 245,3 cents. Net interest-bearing debt fell 53% to R262,4 million, which is the kind of reduction that gives a trading business room to move when input costs and interest rates shift.

The result follows a previous year in which net profit rose 51,1%, with losses from discontinued operations falling to zero.

A hundred years of consolidation

The company’s history explains its reach. The Farmers’ Co-operative Wool and Produce Union was established in Gqeberha in 1919. Boere-Saamwerk Beperk followed in 1920, the Wool Growers Association in 1925 and Koöperatiewe Wolmaatskappy in 1927.

In 1975 those strands came together when FCU, BSB and KWB amalgamated to form BKB. What began as a way for wool farmers to sell together became a diversified group with interests well beyond the auction floor.

The stronger results came after several years of restructuring in which the group streamlined its portfolio and sold off non-core operations that were losing money. That work is now visible in the debt figure and the profit line.

What it means for the people who farm

For a wool or livestock producer in the Eastern Cape, the Northern Cape or the Free State, a group of this size is not an abstraction. It is the buyer, the auction house, the fuel supplier, the retail counter for inputs and the financing arrangement, often in one relationship.

A trading business that carries R15.3 billion in transactions and cuts its own borrowing sharply is a business with more capacity to keep buying stock and paying producers on time, which matters most in the months when a farmer’s cash flow is tightest and the bank is least patient.

Agriculture remains one of the sectors where South African producers compete globally on quality, and wool is among the clearest examples. The country’s fine wool clip is sought after in international markets, and the cooperative structure that BKB grew out of is part of how that trade was organised for more than a century.

The group’s results were reported by IOL. The Enquirer has not independently verified the figures, which are the company’s own reported results for the year to 30 June 2026.

Source: IOL, The little-known South African farming business that generated R6.7 billion last year