Isaias (Zak) Jose Calisto, founder and CEO of major vehicle telematics and tracking company Cartrack, is on track to becoming South Africa’s newest dollar billionaire.
Calisto holds 65% of the Karooooo Group’s shares, the parent company of Cartrack, as well as a further 10% shareholding through a standing agreement with the company, however, this 10% is classified as voting rights only.
Over the past year, Karooooo’s share price has risen by over 100% which in turn greatly increased shareholder fortunes, Calisto, of course, being one of the biggest benefactors.
As of Wednesday, 29 January 2025, Karooooo’s market cap was R27 billion, with Calisto’s stake accordingly equating to R17.55 billion.
At current exchange rates, this equals just shy of one billion US dollars – $940 million to be exact.
From college dropout to car tracking billionaire
Born in Portugal, Calisto moved to Mozambique at the tender age of two before arriving in South Africa soon thereafter.
In 1994, he went to the University of the Witwatersrand in Joburg to study actuarial sciences but found it rather uninspiring.
“At that point in time, I really found that I wasn’t a fit with my other colleagues and the professors,” Calisto told BizNews.
“I just thought I wasn’t cut out to be an actuary.”
He quit his tertiary studies and duly went to complete his military service, and once he exited the armed forces, he did Standard Bank’s accelerated training programme between 1986 and 1991, which gave him a taste for business.
With but R100 in his pocket in 1994 , Calisto started a distribution company for telematics devices with one of his first customers being Netstar, which is among Cartrack’s biggest competitors today.
To help fund the business, Calisto explains that he used incentive programmes from Vodacom and MTN that provided cash bonuses for taking out 24-month contracts.
“In the early days the technologies changed a lot, we had a very good agreement with Vodacom, and in those days both Vodacom and MTN would give you cash incentive bonuses for taking out a 24-month contract, and that money help us fund the business,” he said.
He kept working on his dream and by 1999, he helped Netstar expand its reach into the African continent.
In the meantime, Calisto was busy behind the scenes on his own tracking technologies that would eventually be known as Cartrack, which was launched to the public in 2001 as a joint venture with Netstar.
However, things didn’t work out as planned partly due to differing views on expanding the company, and by 2004, Cartrack separated its partner and became its competitor.
Getting Cartrack off the ground was an uphill battle, to say the least.
To legally operate in the country, Cartrack had to be accredited by the Motor Vehicle Security Association of South Africa (VESA).
However, this required the company to have a customer base of 3,000 subscribers in addition to 100 recoveries. A Catch 22 situation, Cartrack couldn’t sell its services without accreditation, and it couldn’t be accredited without selling.
After much back and forth, Calisto and VESA managed to strike an agreement with Cartrack putting up a financial guarantee that it would meet certain requirements within certain deadlines, or refund all its customers.
The rest, as they say, is history.
Cartrack quickly racked up subscribers and expanded into neighbouring Mozambique.
Calisto explained to CNBC Africa that he chose Mozambique due to the two-way traffic of stolen vehicles that were going to and from South Africa and its northeastern neighbour.
Come 2014, Cartrack put down roots in Asia and, to establish credibility, listed on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange (JSE) in the same year.
Over the next seven years the company continued scaling at a rapid pace, seeing approximately 22% growth per annum.
Once setting up its headquarters in Singapore in 2021, Cartrack shifted away from focusing mostly on South Africa as it became more and more globalised.
It subsequently relisted on the JSE and Nasdaq under the name Karooooo – a name inspired by Calisto’s deep love for the Karoo region.
Today, Karooooo boasts an impressive 2.2 million subscribers across 24 countries as well as a staff complement of over 2,500 employees.
Its subscriber numbers trumped those of its old partner, Netstar, by over 300,000 in 2024; whereas its revenue of around R3.84 billion was 50% higher than Netstar’s.
A key driver of Cartrack’s success not only locally but abroad, too, was Calisto being on the ground and in the trenches with his employees.
When Cartrack set up shop in Europe, the founder spent nine out of the 12 months of the year away from home building the business; and likewise when it entered Asia.
“I don’t think you can build the business if you haven’t got key people outside. You can’t use South Africa as the ivory tower to grow business internationally. I think it’s with huge difficulty – well, I certainly don’t believe we could do it,” said Calisto.
“The way we’ve done it is actually hands-on, travel and getting to know our teams on the ground. Making sure we employ local talent, people that understand the culture. We also very much localise our platforms and technology – as well as our business. We are very much a centralised control system. We are quite fortunate to be a technology company, as have our checks and balances and our controls in place remotely.”
He also believes in never stopping innovating.
“Technology is like a garden — you never stop working on it. We’ve evolved a lot since 2004. What we’re doing today with our technology has nothing to do with what we initially started out with,” said Calisto.
“Our technology is not only about recovering a vehicle or performing analytics on the vehicle’s data, but it’s also become about analytics on the driver and helping businesses deliver good services to their customers.”
Loading ...
