Pinagare Mogodi has a blunt way of describing the mining business in South Africa. A license can cost around R2,500. A mine that actually produces and ships ore can cost R350 million. His summary of the space between those two numbers is short: “Starting is easy. Surviving is the real work.”
Mogodi, the founder and Group Chief Executive Officer of MAB Group, has done more surviving than most. He registered the company, formally Matsapa-A-Botshelo, in 2010 while still at university and grew it from a construction firm into an integrated mining and commodity export group. Today it runs coal operations in Mpumalanga and KwaZulu-Natal, chrome mining and beneficiation in the North West, and an export route through Richards Bay, Durban, and Maydon Wharf. Getting there meant carrying more than R50 million in debt through the pandemic and watching South African coal exports freeze in 2026.
Each time, the company stayed standing because of how he had built it. No single failure was allowed to stop the whole thing.
The early years taught him to read his own numbers
Pinagare Mogodi grew up in Itsoseng, in the North West province, raised by a single mother who worked several jobs to keep him in school. His uncle, Ignatius Oupa Mphomane, a businessman, gave him his first lessons in business ethics and in earning respect through hard work. Mogodi went on to study financial management at Midrand Graduate Institute, and that training became his most useful asset when the company hit trouble.
MAB Group began in construction, and in 2016 he added mining and trucking. Then the pandemic arrived. Projects stalled, retrenchments followed, and debts passed R50 million while he was also going through a divorce. He renegotiated with creditors, restructured the business, and went after coal export contracts, including billion rand deals that became the cash engine for everything that followed.
“The ability to stay calm under pressure and make tough decisions was critical in pulling us out of those difficult times,” he told CIO Views.
Controlling every link between the pit and the ship
In South African mining, processing, logistics, and trade margins have historically gone to outside players. MAB Group was built to keep as much of that chain in-house as it can. The company markets washed and unwashed coal against the standard Richards Bay export grades, and its chrome business, drawn from the Bushveld Igneous Complex, covers exploration, mining, crushing, screening, washing, and beneficiation. African Mining Market reported a secured feed of 135,000 tonnes of ore a month into its beneficiation facilities, with capacity for 90,000 tonnes of concentrate monthly. The flagship chrome operation near Rustenburg carries roughly 22 million tonnes of ore across a long life mine plan, and two further assets hold a combined 55 million tonnes of proven reserves.
Moving that material is its own engineering problem. A fleet of 150 leased trucks, backed by nearly 700 subcontractor vehicles, carries ore from pit to plant, then to the rail siding, then to the port. Mogodi keeps offices on site at the mines for real-time information, runs stockpile inspections for quality control, and stations his own team at Richards Bay. International Business Magazine summed up the formula plainly: control every variable or risk being controlled by it.
Two engines and rules learned the expensive way
The principle holding the group together is short. Never run on one engine. Coal and chrome have different buyers and different logistics chains, so when one market stalls, the other carries the company.
That was tested in 2026, when the conflict between Iran and the United States pushed marine insurance and freight costs so high that South African coal cargoes could not move. Pinagare Mogodi raised capital for chrome, whose route to market did not depend on the same underwriters, and signed long-term chrome supply contracts on weekly mine gate payment terms. By the time shipping insurance returned, chrome was producing steady monthly cash flow, and coal came back on top of it.
His operating rules came from similar lessons. After watching exporters lose money to port slot holders who failed to pass payments on to Transnet, MAB Group pays institutions directly and checks three months of bank statements before trusting any allocation holder. It sells to top ten global counterparties rather thanmid-tierr traders, because a large buyer can absorb a dispute and a small one tends to disappear. It also negotiated a three-year penalty offset agreement in a trade where penalties usually fall due within 30 days, a deal veterans of the business had said could not be done.
“You don’t need handouts to build an empire,” Mogodi told USA Today. “You need courage, discipline, and the right mindset.”
Where the system goes next
The same logic now reaches beyond mining. MAB Energy handles diesel import and storage for the group’s fleets and wider regional supply chains. MAB Connect is working to bring affordable internet to more than 100,000 learners in underserved provinces, and MAB Tech, the IT division, is part of a push to bring technology into every layer of the operation. The group has also announced a venture into Zambia’s copper sector.
Investors have noticed. African Mining Market reported that the company’s valuation doubled to R11.3 billion after new shareholders came in, and MAB Group has announced a R250 million infrastructure investment alongside a 40 percent strategic equity raise for continental expansion. Pinagare Mogodi was among the African business leaders who drew investor attention around the November 2025 G20 Summit in Johannesburg.
Outside the company, his work runs through The Pinagare Mogodi Foundation. His wife, Ivana Agatha Miriam Wilhase, is its Chief Executive Officer and is studying for an LLB alongside Bible studies. The Foundation works with churches and community organisations to support vulnerable families, young entrepreneurs, and survivors of gender based violence.
Mogodi measures that side of the work in jobs. He counts each new mine as roughly a hundred families with an income, a figure he rates above any valuation in a country with South Africa’s unemployment rate. The group employs more than 500 people directly and indirectly, and its three mines each carry a lifespan of more than 30 years.
The next test is whether the system he built as a student holds its shape as it crosses into copper and new markets. His own rule for that is already on record: “Don’t fix the storm. Build the boat that survives every storm.”
