Solar Industries announced on Monday, 14 September that it has agreed to buy Omnia Holdings at R21.8 billion in a bid to expand in the continent’s mining and agriculture industries.
Solar SA Investments, an indirect wholly owned subsidiary of Solar Industries, will acquire all outstanding shares of Johannesburg-listed Omnia, subject to regulatory and Omnia shareholder approvals, the company said in a statement.
Omnia shares rose as much as 7.6% on the news and were trading 4.1% higher by mid-morning in Johannesburg, giving the company a market value of about 19.8 billion rand.
Omnia will be delisted from both the Johannesburg Stock Exchange and A2X Markets, the alternative exchange that Capitec joined this month. Completion is expected in early to mid-2027, subject to regulatory and competition approvals in the jurisdictions involved.
Managing Director and Chief Executive of Solar Group, Manish Nuwal mentioned that the company had long admired Omnia for the strength of its mining and agriculture businesses, its technologies and brands, and customer relationships built over many years.
He described the purchase as an important step toward becoming a global leader in explosives and blasting, and said BME brings an international mining platform, manufacturing assets, technological leadership in electronic initiation systems, integrated ammonium nitrate production and an established presence across Africa. The combined group, he said, would create the most integrated global blasting platform.
The acquisition also takes Solar into integrated crop nutrition and biological solutions for the first time.
Solar has been building in Southern Africa for sixteen years. The Nagpur-based company entered the region in 2010 with a manufacturing plant in Zambia, began operating in South Africa in 2015 through a distribution platform, and commissioned a factory at Middelburg in Mpumalanga in 2017. It bought ProBlast, which provides drilling, blasting and explosives services to open-cast mines, in 2024.
It makes industrial explosives and initiating systems for mining, infrastructure, construction, defence and space customers.
