Quick Facts
Biography
Allan WB Gray is a South African business magnate, investor and philanthropist. He is best known as the one of the richest men in Africa and founder of Allan Gray Investment Management as well as the non-profit Allan Gray Orbis Foundation and the Allan and Gill Gray Charitable Trust. Before he donated his stake in Allan Gray Investment Management his net worth was estimated to have been US$10.5 billion (105 billion South African Rand) in 2013.
Early life
He was born in the South African city of East London in 1938. After completing high school at Selborne College, he studied accounting at Rhodes University and went on to obtain a master's degree at the Harvard Business School.
Professional life
After graduating from Harvard Gray started working for the financial firm Fidelity Management and Research in the city of Boston, United States where he stayed for eight years. He returned to South Africa in 1973 to found what would become Allan Gray Investment Management in Cape Town. The company initially focused on investment counselling, later growing to include institutional clients. He then set up the Orbis Group in 1989 in London to focus on investing in the international markets. Two years later the company was moved to Bermuda. By 2015 his company was managing over $40 billion in assets. The return on investment from Allan Gray and Orbis since its founding is comparable in success to Warren Buffett's firm Berkshire Hathaway.
Philanthropy
Gray established the Allan Gray Foundation in 2007 with a US$130 million endowment to fund bursaries and scholarships for talented South African high school students. This was the largest single recorded donation to a charity in South Africa at the time. In 1979 he founded the Allan and Gill Gray Charitable Trust. In 2016 he donated his entire stake in his company to the Allan and Gill Gray Charitable Trust so that dividends from his share in both the South African company and the Orbis Group can be exclusively used for philanthropic purposes.
Awards and honours
In 2012 he was awarded an honorary Doctor of Economic Science from the University of Cape Town.