Star 2023-10-18

Launch of Amazon e-commerce in SA may force local e-commerce players to reduce their fees SOUTH African businesses now have an additional e-commerce and online retailing platform after Amazon, the giant US company that is spreading across the globe, launched a local sellers platform to rival takealot.com in a rapidly growing and multibillion industry. Takealot.com, currently the biggest player in South Africa’s online retailing, owned by JSE-listed Naspers, had some 14 million visits to its e-commerce platform last year, 90% of whom were registered in South Africa, data from Statista shows. South Africa’s e-commerce giants include, among others, Takealot, Makro, Superbalist, Bash and Loot.co.za. RMB research sees the value of e-commerce transactions in South Africa surging by 150% to R225 billion by 2025. This is the industry that…

AFRICAN countries need to convey to the Cop 28 global conference that climate change should not be weaponised against countries that have energy poverty, Mineral Resources and Energy Minister Gwede Mantashe said. Speaking at the Energy Africa conference in Cape Town yesterday, Mantashe said there were countries in sub-Saharan Africa where electrification reached only 12% of the population. An energy transition did not mean the same thing in this country, as it did in a country where there was 100% electricity accessibility. He said de-emphasising energy poverty in favour of decarbonisation was bad for the environment, as poverty would degrade the environment in the longer term. African countries needed to convey to Cop 28 that the use of gas, a less damaging fossil fuel, needed to be fast-tracked in Africa.…

THE DEPARTMENT of Tourism will continue implementing regional and international tourism marketing campaigns to position South Africa as a viable tourism destination. This is one of the seven strategic interventions in the Tourism Sector Master Plan which was gazetted on Friday by the Minister of Tourism, Patricia de Lille, after the conversion of the Tourism Sector Recovery Plan. De Lille yesterday said the Master Plan was aimed to galvanise industry, labour and government to collectively act on a shared vision, identify priorities, and deliver economic activity and jobs for all South Africans. “The pillars and strategic interventions of the Tourism Sector Recovery Plan have been adopted for the Master Plan and therefore the effective implementation of the Plan will be anchored on seven Strategic Interventions supported by catalytic programmes with…

THE SOUTH African Reserve Bank (SARB) has given the strongest indication yet that it will not begin cutting interest rates before the year ends as it needs to tame inflation to the midpoint of the target range for a sustainable period. In its October Monetary Policy Review published yesterday, the SARB said that upside risks to inflation had strengthened over the past months, heightening uncertainty about a precise path for inflation. The SARB said that in spite of headline inflation decelerating towards the 4.5% midpoint of the target range, upside pressures to core inflation were reflected in still elevated survey-based inflation expectations and a weak rand, with further risks emanating from load shedding. Headline inflation rose to 4.8% in August and September, and is projected to average 5.9% in 2023,…

WHILE Eskom is turning a performance corner, it has to contend with a massive growth in South Africa’s population, which has increased by 10.3 million since 2011, Statistics South Africa (StatsSA) revealed last week. StatsSA released the results of its Census 2022, showing that the popu- lation increased from 51.7 million in 2011 to more than 62 million in 2022; a growth rate of 19.8% in the intercensal period. That is the reason why Eskom is not coping; we need to double the energy generation capacity and build more power stations to keep up with population growth. The Achilles heel of South Africa is the energy crisis. While policy makers and the government ignore the need to build more power stations and respond to the alarming market demand…

AS SOUTH Africa’s economic growth struggles to trend upwards, with the weight of load shedding suppressing the optimism in its industries and while we wait for solutions to magic themselves out of thin air, it seems the planners of the country have let us down in their foresight to plan adequately and implement infrastructure that will solve the load shedding fiasco. President Cyril Ramaphosa was first appointed to the energy action task group in 2014, when he was Deputy President. If anything, the problem has worsened under his oversight and planning. The problem that poor planning has created is a bottleneck in the transmission grid. There are many renewable projects that want to connect, but they are in a queue, waiting for the transmission grid’s capacity to be expanded. This…