Sameer Africa PLC: 2024 Annual Report and Financial Statements

Sameer Africa PLC is one of Kenya’s longest-running listed companies, founded in 1969 and trading on the Nairobi Securities Exchange with thousands of shareholders. The Baobab Collective has designed the company’s annual report every year since 2021, working directly with Finance, Human Resources, Legal, and the executive team to turn departmental data into a single cohesive publication.

This case study is on the 2024 Annual Report and Financial Statements, the most recent edition shipped before this writing. We are currently in production on the 2025 report.

The Challenge

Annual reports for a publicly listed company are an unusual design problem. They are simultaneously a regulatory document (financial statements that auditors and the Capital Markets Authority will scrutinise), a shareholder communication (going to thousands of investors who need to actually read it), and a brand publication (representing the company to partners, customers, and prospective hires).

The raw inputs are not designed for design. Finance sends Excel spreadsheets with multi-page financial statements. HR sends Word documents with team directories and remuneration disclosures. Legal sends governance reports and director biographies. Operations sends performance narratives. The job is to receive all of that, organise it into a publication that flows, and produce something that holds up next to the annual reports of any East African listed company.

For the 2024 edition, the editorial brief carried an additional creative requirement: mark Sameer’s standing as a heritage Kenyan business in a way that felt confident rather than nostalgic.

Our Approach

The 2024 report was built in Adobe InDesign as the master layout, with Adobe Illustrator handling the iconography and Adobe Photoshop preparing the photography. Here is what shipped in the book:

• Cover concept: a numerical "56" (Sameer’s years in operation) composed entirely of cropped photographs of the company’s Nairobi headquarters, depots, and operational facilities. A heritage signal made from real, current places rather than archival imagery
• Editorial grid built to handle the wide range of page types in a single book: chairman’s statement, governance reports, director biographies, sustainability narratives, and dense financial tables
• Custom iconography in Illustrator for the operational sections, governance principles, and key financial metrics, turning what would otherwise be wall-of-text pages into navigable visual reference
• Photographic treatment in Photoshop applied consistently across every image, with a unified colour temperature and contrast profile so the book reads as one publication rather than a stitched-together pile
• Financial statements typography: dense numerical tables set in a typeface and grid system that audit teams can read without strain, with consistent row heights and proper alignment of debits, credits, and totals across hundreds of pages
• Cross-departmental coordination: working directly with Finance, HR, and Legal teams to receive raw inputs in their working formats (Word, Excel) and turn them into press-ready spreads
• Dual-format output: print-ready PDF for stakeholder distribution and a digital-optimised PDF published on the Sameer Africa investor relations site for shareholder access

The Result

The 2024 Annual Report and Financial Statements shipped on schedule, was distributed digitally to Sameer’s shareholder base, and printed for stakeholder distribution. As is the nature of annual reports, the metrics that matter are quieter than a marketing campaign’s: shareholders read the document, the AGM proceeds, the report sits in the company archive as the official record of the financial year. Done well, nobody comments on the design. Done badly, everyone does.

The 2024 edition continues a five-year run of producing this report on schedule, and the 2025 edition is in production now. Earlier reports in the series (designed by our founder while serving as Lead Designer at Sameer Africa) won the FiRe Award Overall Winner in both 2017 and 2018, the only back-to-back wins in the company’s history. That long relationship with the document, the team, and the institutional voice is what makes each new edition possible to deliver in the timeframe required.