ASB Hospitality has completed the US$30 million acquisition of Makasa Sun, owner of the 294-room Kingdom Hotel in Victoria Falls, from First Capital Bank and its staff pension fund

The deal lifts ASB’s total Zimbabwe hotel investment to US$50 million, following its earlier US$20 million acquisition of Meikles Hotel, now operated as Hyatt Regency Harare, The Meikles

Kingdom Hotel is expected to undergo refurbishment and rebranding, with the transaction positioning ASB across Zimbabwe’s commercial capital and its most recognised tourism destination

Harare- ASB Hospitality LLC, the Dubai-based subsidiary of Albwardy Investment, has completed the acquisition of Makasa Sun (Private) Limited, owner of the 294-room Kingdom Hotel in Victoria Falls, for USD 30 million from First Capital Bank and the First Capital Bank Staff Pension Fund.

The completion was confirmed by First Capital Bank, which held a 50% stake in Makasa Sun alongside the pension fund's complementary 50% interest. A USD 3 million deposit had been placed in escrow on signing of the binding share purchase agreement in November 2025, with the remaining USD 27 million settled on completion following regulatory clearances from the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe's Exchange Control Department and the COMESA Competition Commission.

The transaction is not ASB Hospitality's introduction to Zimbabwe. ASB bought Meikles Hotel for USD 20 million in 2019, bringing it under the Hyatt Regency brand. With the Kingdom Hotel now acquired for USD 30 million, ASB has committed USD 50 million to Zimbabwe's premium hospitality sector across two transactions spanning six years  making it, by capital deployed, the most significant single foreign investor in Zimbabwe's hotel industry.

The acquisition marks a further expansion of Albwardy's footprint in Zimbabwe's high-end tourism market, with the Victoria Falls property set to undergo extensive refurbishment and rebranding as part of a broader strategy to reposition assets under internationally recognised luxury standards.

The strategic logic of the Kingdom Hotel acquisition is best read through the Meikles precedent. ASB's successful revamp of the Meikles Hotel into the Hyatt Regency Harare, The Meikles elevated standards and drew international guests. The Meikles transaction followed a predictable pattern: asset acquired below replacement cost, international brand attached through Albwardy's existing Hyatt relationship, capital invested in refurbishment to bring physical standards to brand specification, and room rates and occupancy repositioned toward the international corporate and luxury leisure segments that pay in foreign currency and book through global reservation systems.

ASB Hospitality, a Dubai-based arm of Albwardy Investment, manages 18 luxury properties across four continents with over 1,300 rooms. The group's operational model is asset-light in management,  it acquires the property, attaches a global brand, and operates the hotel through the brand's management system rather than building its own standalone hospitality management infrastructure.

That model is exactly what Zimbabwe's legacy hotel assets require: they carry strong locational attributes and cultural recognition, but their physical plant and reservation systems have fallen behind international competitive standards through years of underinvestment. Albwardy provides the capital, the brand relationship, and the management expertise, Zimbabwe provides the location.

The Kingdom Hotel, a 294-room fixture overlooking the Zambezi River and mere minutes from the iconic falls, ceased operations in early 2023 amid a protracted lease dispute with former manager Africa Sun Limited. Two years of closure have left the property dormant while Victoria Falls's tourism sector recovered strongly around it. Zimbabwe recorded 1.6 million visitors in 2024, generating USD 1.2 billion, above pre-pandemic levels.

The hotel's reopening under an international brand, at a moment when Victoria Falls's inbound visitor traffic is at record levels and Forbes named Zimbabwe the world's top travel destination for 2025, is timed as well as any hotel developer could engineer.

The sellers' motivation is analytically straightforward. The bank said the sale is part of a strategic shift to unlock shareholder value by shedding non-core hospitality assets and refocusing on core banking and financial services. FCB is a VFEX-listed bank , Zimbabwe's first entity to list on the Victoria Falls Stock Exchange whose core business is commercial banking across Zimbabwe's dollarised economy.

A 50% stake in a closed hotel is not a banking asset, it generates no fee income, no interest income, and no return on capital deployed while remaining dormant. The bank said Kingdom Hotel had been classified as a dormant entity in its consolidated accounts, meaning the divestment is not expected to materially affect earnings or headline earnings per share.

The pricing, however, deserves attention. As of October 31, 2024, the consolidated net asset value attributable to Kingdom Hotel stood at USD 27,978,445, while First Capital Bank's 50% equity stake was valued at USD 15 million. The total transaction value of USD 30 million for 100% of Makasa Sun implies a price roughly equal to the hotel's NAV, not a premium, but not a distressed disposal either.

For a property that has been closed for two years and is generating zero revenue, a sale at NAV represents a reasonable exit for FCB and the pension fund. For ASB, acquiring a 294-room Victoria Falls property at NAV, before the refurbishment premium that international branding will generate , is a transaction that makes commercial sense precisely because the closed-hotel discount embedded in the NAV is temporary rather than structural.

The disposal represents 11.19% of the bank's market capitalisation as at September 17, 2025, making it a Category 3 transaction under VFEX listing requirements. The USD 15 million FCB receives for its stake, which will be deployed into tax obligations and core banking operations per FCB's stated use of proceeds, represents a meaningful capital event for a bank. The pension fund's equivalent USD 15 million exit similarly realises a long-held illiquid asset into cash that can be deployed into the liquid, diversified instruments that defined-benefit pension funds are designed to hold.
The UAE-Zimbabwe Hospitality Corridor

The completion of the Kingdom Hotel transaction establishes ASB Hospitality as the operator of Zimbabwe's two most strategically located premium hotel properties: Hyatt Regency Harare,  The Meikles in the country's commercial capital, and the soon-to-be-rebranded Kingdom Hotel at its most internationally recognised tourist destination. Together, these two assets position ASB to capture the full itinerary of the international visitor to Zimbabwe, the Harare arrival, the business meeting, and the Victoria Falls extension,  within a single hotel relationship, with loyalty points, brand recognition, and reservation systems all connected through Albwardy's global brand partnerships.

For ASB, the move bolsters its African footprint, including a recent majority stake in Lusaka's Taj Pamodzi Hotel. The southern and eastern Africa premium hotel portfolio that Albwardy is assembling, Harare, Victoria Falls, Lusaka  reflects a geographic thesis about the region's tourism trajectory: improving air connectivity, rising business travel from Asian investors, recovering leisure tourism to wildlife destinations, and a valuation discount relative to comparable assets in East Africa or South Africa that creates acquisition opportunity for a patient, capital-backed buyer.

For Zimbabwe, the USD 50 million in foreign direct investment that ASB has now committed to the country's hotel sector across two transactions  both involving assets that were distressed or underperforming at the time of acquisition is the type of long-term, capital-intensive investment that produces measurable foreign currency earnings, employment, and supply chain development in the tourism economy. The Kingdom Hotel's 294 rooms, at international luxury occupancy rates and USD room rates consistent with the Victoria Falls market, will generate foreign currency revenues, pay taxes, source goods and services locally, and employ Zimbabweans in skilled hospitality roles,  all of which the two-year closure period was not doing.

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