SUJÁN buys Chiawa Camp and Old Mondoro in Zambia

Jaisal Singh has bought Chiawa Camp and Old Mondoro in Zambia, the first time his hotel company SUJÁN has acquired a business outside India.

SUJÁN announced the purchase from Chiawa Safaris on Monday, Sept. 28. Neither side disclosed what was paid.

Both camps sit on the banks of the Zambezi in Lower Zambezi National Park, among the least developed protected areas in southern Africa. Chiawa is the older and better known, and Old Mondoro sits deeper inside the park with only a few tents. What the camps sell is the absence of other people.

Singh did not frame the deal as an expansion. Africa has always been a special place for him, he said, not only for the wildlife and landscapes but for what the continent has demonstrated about responsible tourism working as a partner in conservation, and he called the purchase far more than a geographic move.

He already had a camp there. SUJÁN has run Elephant Pepper Camp in Kenya’s Maasai Mara for years, so Zambia is the company’s first African acquisition rather than its first African property.

What sits behind SUJÁN is an industrial fortune. Singh is a director of the supervisory board of ANAND Group, the Indian automotive components manufacturer, and vice chairman of its executive board, where he chairs the strategic growth council that handles mergers and acquisitions. His wife and SUJÁN co-founder Anjali Singh is ANAND’s executive chairperson, having succeeded her father Deep C. Anand at 33, and she also chairs Gabriel India, the group’s listed ride-control business. Kotak Wealth Hurun estimated her net worth at 34.5 billion rupees in 2020.

The hotel business started long before the money was needed. Singh opened Sher Bagh at Ranthambhore in 2000, one of India’s first luxury safari camps, then did a joint venture with Aman Resorts that produced Aman-i-Khas at the same reserve. The Serai in Jaisalmer followed in 2009 and JAWAI, built around leopards between Jodhpur and Udaipur, in 2013.

Every SUJÁN property in India belongs to Relais and Châteaux, and Singh was elected vice-president of that association in 2013, the youngest person and the only Indian ever to hold the post. He is also an author on wildlife and on polo, and chairs the rules committee of the Indian Polo Association.

Both businesses in this deal were built by families. Chiawa Safaris has run the Lower Zambezi camps for decades and SUJÁN describes the purchase as bringing two family-founded organisations together.

Zambia is a reasonable place to buy. Visitor numbers have risen sharply in recent years, its parks remain far less crowded than those in Kenya, Tanzania and South Africa, and the Lower Zambezi has attracted operators selling scarcity rather than volume.

The camps will keep their names inside the SUJÁN group, which says the purchase is the start of a wider international portfolio.