A recent admission by Jason Goodall, former CEO of Dimension Data and NTT Ltd, caused a wide resonance. He stated that his hidden interests were realized through nominal persons within a structure designed to keep his identity secret. This statement was made in the context of his acknowledgment of participation in the deal to sell the company's head office in Bryanston in 2019.
Four men he named—Jeremy Ord, Steven Nathan, Saki Missaikos, and Grant Bodley—reject this version of events. They claim that the wording was dictated by settlement terms with NTT and are awaiting a decision from the supreme appellate court.
The author expresses concern that this dispute over information concealment in the office park will be how Dimension Data is remembered, which is a great pity given that for most of its 40 years, the company was one of South Africa's significant business stories, despite difficulties after the dot-com crash.
The Birth and Growth of Dimension Data
Dimension Data was founded in 1983 and first listed on the JSE in 1987. The company was based on a group of school friends, including Ord, Bruce 'Doc' Watson, and later Richard Kemp. As Kemp recalled, they created something none of them could have imagined.
The foundation of their success lay in network technologies: selling, installing, and servicing Cisco equipment, which formed the basis of the internet. In the 1990s, this brought huge profits; Ord recalled that the gross profit on Cisco equipment was 'around 50%' in a 2020 interview. Kemp more melancholically noted that efficiency mattered less when margins were high and the market was growing rapidly.
As South Africa moved out of apartheid and companies gained freedom to enter international markets, Didata began expanding more actively than most. In 1998, it acquired Internet Solutions, one of the pioneers of internet services in the country, for a sum exceeding 400 million rand. The company also invested in Datacraft in Australia and Asia, as well as in Comparex in Europe. For a time, Didata became an asset that every South African fund manager should have.
On July 19, 2000, Didata moved its main listing to London. Ord recounted that the government 'rejected and rejected and rejected' the application since 1998 until he called Maria Ramos, the then Treasury CEO, on the last possible day. Two months later, on September 18, the company entered the FTSE 100 at position 42 with a market value of about $11 billion USD. On the JSE, its value reached 77.4 billion rand—for a short time, the most valuable public company in South Africa. Shares traded at 70 rand.
Ord reported: 'We immediately got into the FTSE 100. Then a year later, almost on the same date, everything collapsed.'
The Company's Decline
The collapse happened in two stages. The first was related to America. In June 2001, as the dot-com bubble was bursting, Didata won a tender against Compaq for Proxicom, a consulting firm in Virginia, as part of a deal valued at $478 million at the time. This turned out to be a terrible moment. Less than three years later, it was sold for only about $10 million. Ord noted that this was a very poor decision.
The second and more serious blow came in Europe, where the acquisition cost of Comparex was written off by more than $1.1 billion. By September 2001, Didata had incurred losses of $1.7 billion. The following year, losses reached $2.6 billion. The share price, which reached 10 pounds sterling in London, fell to 13.75 pence. Ord stated that the margin 'collapsed from 50% to 15% practically overnight,' and 3,500 of 11,000 jobs were cut.
Ord's verdict regarding the Proxicom deal, voiced to TechCentral in 2009, was unequivocal: 'Would we do the American deal again? Never!'
Business Revival
Next followed a phase that deserves more attention. Didata did not disappear. Brett Dawson, a chartered accountant who joined through the Internet Solutions division and was sent to handle financial matters in North America in 2001, became COO in 2002, and later CEO in March 2004, while Ord transitioned to Executive Chairman. Kemp, who left the company after the crisis, highly praised Dawson for 'returning the company to a strong position.' By the time Dawson left in 2016, revenue had quadrupled, reaching $8 billion.
It was this revived business that attracted the attention of the Japanese corporation NTT. NTT first showed interest in 2008. Management refused them because Ord stated: 'We still didn't want to sell. We opposed it until the end.' However, major shareholders agreed to the deal. In July 2010, NTT offered 120 pence per share, valuing Didata at £2.1 billion, or approximately 24.4 billion rand at the time. By the end of that year, the company was delisted in Johannesburg and London.
For some time, the Japanese side did not interfere in operations. Ord noted in 2011: 'They didn't interfere with the business management at all.' But large Japanese conglomerates do not buy companies to leave them alone forever. In July 2019, Didata was integrated into NTT Ltd, a global $11 billion operation managed by Goodall from London, and the name Dimension Data survived only in the Middle East and Africa. Ord and his colleagues spent two years trying to buy back the African business. When NTT refused, they left. On April 1, 2024, the name itself disappeared.
However, the business itself continued to exist. It operates as NTT Data in the Middle East and Africa—using the same networks, data centers, and client relationships, as well as many former employees, but under the Japanese name.
The Office Park Case
This brings us back to The Campus complex—a vast office park in Bryanston that was largely the physical embodiment of Didata's ambitions. Its sale in December 2019 to a fund led by a Black woman was initially presented as an important step toward transformation.
However, in January 2022, TechCentral first revealed that a forensic accounting investigation found that former executives held hidden stakes in the buyer. In November 2024, Judge Denise Fisher declared the deal void, finding that six of them 'entered into an illegal scheme intended to gain secret financial benefit,' calling it 'brazen and dishonest.'
Goodall admitted his involvement and agreed to pay NTT about 208.6 million rand. The others deny guilt, and their appeal awaits a decision. They have the right to this process. Nevertheless, reading the case materials makes it difficult not to conclude that something ultimately went wrong in the culture of a company that once prided itself above all else on its culture.
The People Who Built the Company
But this is not the whole story, and it should not be the only part remembered. For three decades, Dimension Data served as one of the great talent factories in South African business. It prepared people who subsequently created and managed their own companies—Richard Kemp, David Frankel, Alon Apteker, Malcolm Rutherford, among others mentioned in Duarte da Silva's recollections of those early days.
The company trained thousands of engineers, salespeople, and project managers who today hold senior positions in the industry, both domestically and abroad. Most of the tens of thousands of people who passed through Dimension Data and its subsidiaries over 40 years never made it into boardrooms, let alone office park deals. They built networks, managed data centers, ensured the operation of banks and retail stores, and this is what made the company what it became. Many of them still work at NTT Data. They deserve for the name Dimension Data to be remembered for what they built, not for how it ended.