10/08/2026
Build Once, Own Forever: The Idea Behind CHIH Group
In 2003, as a university student, Ntwanano Chavalala sketched a diagram for an assignment that had nothing to do with his own life and everything to do with it. It was meant to describe how a business could grow. Instead, it became the outline of a group — not one business doing one thing well, but several businesses, each doing one thing well, held together by a single hand.
Two decades later, that diagram is CHIH Group: eight subsidiaries — Chaval Publishing, Chaval Communications, BLS Kitchens & Furnitures, CCR 247 Radio, Pasturelands Properties, CHIHTech, Chaval Pictures, and CHIH Investment Management — working toward a combined R100 million in annual revenue.
“A single skill is a job,” says Chavalala, whose career took him through Soweto TV, Y-FM, the Sowetan, and the SABC before he built CHIH Group. “A collection of skills, working together, is a business. And several businesses, working together under one roof, is something else entirely.”
The pattern is visible across the Group's history. In 2011, while still on air at the SABC, Chavalala registered his first companies, Chaval Productions and Chaval Communications. In 2013, he acquired a stake in BLS Kitchens & Furnitures — not with capital, but with marketing and business management expertise built from years in media. CCR 247 launched as a pilot digital station in 2016 and went fully live in 2022. Chaval Publishing has since published over 100 titles.
“You are not just buying a service,” Chavalala says of any client working with a CHIH Group subsidiary. “You are plugging into a group built on the belief that expertise compounds when it's allowed to move between ventures instead of being locked inside one.”
That belief — build the capability once, own it forever, deploy it everywhere it fits — is now the thread running through every subsidiary's marketing, every client relationship, and every new venture CHIH Group takes on.
