Kenya’s move to fully liberalize its foreign exchange market in 1994 prompted Ndung’u to venture out the next year in 1995, starting off as the owner of a start-up forex bureau along Kimathi Street in Nairobi. “I had visited Uganda and seen that forex bureaus were making large margins of up to 15 per cent on trades,” he said.

He went on to own two more bureaus, circumventing the Central Bank law that prohibited forex bureaus from opening branches.

In 2001, he teamed up with a partner to form Mobicom, a dealer that rod the wave of Safaricom’s success for a decade. With 42 outlets countrywide, Mobicom quickly became one of Kenya’s leading telecommunications firms providing retail and wholesale scratch cards, phones and other accessories.

“I had travelled to a number of countries and realised the growth opportunities in the mobile phone industry,” he said, highlighting the cases of Egypt and Uganda which were well ahead of Kenya in mobile telephony at the turn of the century. When the service opened in Kenya, Safaricom was able to penetrate most parts of the country with its services and products thereby increasing its subscriber base and earnings,” he said.

His biggest money making trades, though have been on the NSE. The trades which elevated him to the billionaires club came in the early 2000s. He had been buying and selling shares, booking profits from the transactions at a time when there was no limit on daily share price movements at the NSE.

Sometime in 2002, Mr. Ndung’u decided to bet big on Kenya Power shares which were trading at sh. 1 per share. “I thought that it was an undervaluation of the company and I bought a he chunk,” he said. He bought one million shares and a year later, he sold them at Sh. 6 each, raking in sh. 6 million.

He then combined these proceeds with bank loans to make an even larger leveraged bet on Kenya Airways, buying 16 million shares at around Sh. 6 each in 2003.

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