Vimal Shah, The Force Behind BIDCO Africa’s Success

Vimal Shah is a renowned businessman, an ambitious entrepreneur and a real idealist industrialist in Kenya, which is the largest economy in the East African Community.

He is the man at the helm of BIDCO Africa where he has worked through thick and thin to bring the company from infancy to where it is now.

He is the Chief Executive Officer of BIDCO Africa, the business conglomerate involved in the manufacture of edible oil, detergents, soaps, margarine as well as baking powder and is in fact reported to be one of the wealthiest individuals in Kenya.

Vimal Shah was born in Kenya and he holds a BSc Degree in Business Administration and Finance from United States International University and this is the man who is responsible for the transformation of BIDCO Africa into an East African industrial giant respected throughout the region for its remarkable business journey and the success story of building the economy of not only Kenya but the whole East African Region.

Through hard work, marred with endless sweat, blood and the zeal to go on, Vimal Shah has won a host of awards due to his remarkable and phenomenal work with BIDCO Africa. For instance, in 2012, he won the All Africa Business Leaders Awards’ prestigious East African Entrepreneur of the Year. The Kenyan government also rewarded him with the Moran of the Order of the Burning Spear (MBS) Award in 2004, and the First Class: Chief of the Order of the Burning Spear during the 48th Jamhuri Day celebrations in December 2011.

The most important one came in 2008 when the Kenya Institute of Management awarded him CEO of the Year with BIDCO Africa winning Company of the year.

The story of Mr. Vimal Shah with BIDCO Africa does not begin today. It began in the 1980s when he and his brother Tarun walked into several banks in Kenya to ask for a loan with which they could use to set up BIDCO Africa but they were turned away.

This is a man who takes risks. He does not flow with the wind but flows against it and so does BIDCO Africa. He decided to venture into a business that had already been long since been dominated by big multinationals such as Unilever.

To prove all the banks that had thought that they would never make it wrong, by the year 2002, BIDCO Oil Refineries acquired part of Unilever Kenya’s edible oils business.

“We proved wrong all the bank managers who warned us that Unilever’s competition would kill our business,” Mr. Shah said in one of his remarks.

The success story of BIDCO’s soap and oil manufacturing business for the past 30 years (and counting) is largely credited upon this man.