Mark and Brett Levy, the South African brothers who built Blue Label Telecoms from a high school side hustle into one of the JSE's most recognisable technology and telecoms companies, have lost a combined R1.58 billion 97.1 million in paper wealth in ten months after a disappointing Cell C initial public offering drove their company's share price down by more than 50 percent between August 2025 and June 2026.
The decline has cut their combined fortune roughly in half in less than a year, a reversal that underscores how exposed both men's net worth remains to the performance of a single listed vehicle despite decades of business building across multiple sectors.
The brothers started in entrepreneurship while still at high school, buying and selling televisions, hi-fi sets and car radios to classmates and neighbours. They moved into consumer electronics distribution and insurance replacements before identifying the emerging opportunity in prepaid mobile airtime as South Africa's telecommunications market liberalised. In June 2001, they launched The Prepaid Company, later renamed Blue Label Telecoms, and won a national contract from Telkom to distribute prepaid airtime for fixed-line services. From that anchor contract, they built a national distribution network that attracted Vodacom, MTN and Cell C, pioneered the shift from physical scratch cards to electronic distribution, and expanded into electricity vouchers, starter packs, prepaid data and ticketing. In 2007, six years after launch, they listed on the JSE.
