How much money you’d have if you invested R1,000 in WeBuyCars one year ago

You’d have R1,956 today if you purchased R1,000 worth of WeBuyCars (WBC) shares a year ago.

WBC went public as its own entity on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange (JSE) on the morning of 11 April 2024, seeing fervent demand from investors right from the get-go.

The company issued a whopping 417,181,120 shares which went live at R20.00 per share, granting the business a market capitalisation of approximately R7.82 billion at the time.

Since then, the price of the stock surged to a high of R48.52 per share on Monday, 9 December 2024, before paring back to R39.12 per share by 11 April 2025, a year after launch.

The tremendous growth proves that the unbundling of WBC from previous parent company Transaction Capital’s was the right decision.

“The prudent decision to unbundle and separately list WeBuyCars on the JSE resulted in many ensuing benefits,” said Non-executive Chairman, Johan Holtzhausen, in WBC’s inaugural integrated annual report.

“Public investors now could invest directly into a high-performing and well-known business which has good growth prospects and generates strong cash flows.”

The company, in turn, gained access to deeper pools of capital to pursue expansion opportunities and to further deliver sustainable value creation for stakeholders over the long term, said Holtzhausen.

With the cash injection afforded by the JSE listing, WBC was able to open a new used-car “supermarket” in East London, Eastern Cape, as well as one in Rustenburg, North West.

Additionally, it acquired land in Cape Town, Western Cape, and Pretoria, Gauteng, where it’s currently in the process of constructing two more showrooms; and it purchased an existing dealership facility in Vereeniging, Gauteng, which is being converted into a WBC outlet.

The graph below details the share price of WBC over the 12 months since it was listed on the JSE:

WBC hits it out of the park

With an annual share price growth of 95.6%, WBC outperformed most of the top stock picks on the JSE last year

An analysis by MoneyWeb of the top-performing stocks on the JSE in 2024 found that just 11 shares beat WBC, comprising:

• Seam – 1,160% growth
• Kore – 225% growth
• Stefstock – 215% growth
• Eastplats – 150% growth
• Nampak – 123% growth
• Quantum – 116% growth
• Premier – 108% growth
• Lonfin – 104% growth
• Altron – 103% growth
• Numeral – 100% growth
• Pan-Af – 96% growth

It must be noted that these percentages were recorded between January and December 2024, whereas WBC’s performance was taken from April 2024 to April 2025.

Regardless, when comparing 12-month periods, WBC was still among the best performers on the JSE.

The majority of these top stocks are in the financial services, IT, mining, or construction sectors, making the tremendous growth of WBC even more impressive.

For instance, the top two companies, Seam and Kore – short for Sable Exploration and Mining, and Kore Potash – are both major stakeholders in the mining industry and their share prices are not only linked to their own performance, but also to the value of the minerals they extract from the ground.

Stefstock, meanwhile, stands for Stefanutti Stocks, which is a multidisciplinary construction company specialising in large-scale building, civils, geotechnical, roads, and earthworks projects across southern Africa.

What’s more, WBC dusted index fund favourites such as the JSE All Share Index and JSE Top 40, which posted returns of 9.2% and 7% in 2024, respectively.

For WBC to sit among these multinational conglomerates while beating other long-established market darlings speaks volumes of the value investors see in the homegrown used-car retailer.