Africa

Howard Craig was brought in from the oil and gas industry over three years ago: his mission to breathe new life into one of South Africa’s key businesses. Rand Refinery, since 1967 the sole producer of Krugerrands and gold bars destined for the bullion banks of the world along with gold bars, is the pipeline to the market for the greater part of Africa’s gold doré – the semi pure product from the mines.

Over the last two decades the West African country of Ghana has successfully evolved into a stable and mature democracy. Hand-in-hand with this development has been the emergence of its blossoming economy, one that continues to grow ahead of the average for the African region, with GDP growth registered at 15 percent in 2011 and 7.9 percent in 2012.

With limited capital, the company known as Zambeef was incorporated in 1994. Employing 60 staff, slaughtering 180 cattle per month in a rented abattoir, delivering meat via a single Land Rover and selling it through two rented butcheries, it was very much a small-scale operation to begin with. Nevertheless, through a combination of organic growth and acquisitions, the company went on to become one of Zambia’s largest agri-businesses, achieving a compounded organic growth rate of over 20 percent in real terms between 2003 and 2008 alone.

Mutanda, with operations in Katanga, is seen as one of Glencore's key growth assets in Central Africa's copper belt and the cash purchase sees the mining and commodities trading major acquire the remaining 14.5 percent indirect equality in the copper and cobalt producer.  

A city grows up over decades, an expression of the society that creates it. As society changes, the city becomes a repository of its own past, reflecting layers of its history. So Rome is a modern capital and at the same time a museum of a past civilisation. Not ideal for cars, but they live with it! But some of South Africa’s urban legacy is not so worthy of preservation, and they don’t need to live with it.

If any proof were needed to support the belief that Africa has become one of the world’s epicentres for mining success over the last decade, one arguably needs to look no further than Randgold Resources. An Africa-focused gold mining and exploration company, it has been the architect behind a host of major discoveries to date in Mali, the Côte d’Ivoire, Senegal and the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC).

South Africa’s first black president Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela died on Thursday December 5 at the age of 95 finally succumbing to to a lung infection that he had been suffering from for some time. When his death was announced, word spread quickly. South Africans flocked to pay tribute to this the father of the nation, while world leaders paid their tributes. President Obama said: "The world has lost an "influential, courageous and profoundly good man ... he no longer belongs to us. He belongs to the ages."

The Maputo Corridor is a great African success story in terms of regional integration between the regions of Swaziland, southern Mozambique and the industrialised regions of Mpumalanga, Gauteng and Limpopo. And it is a traditional route for people and goods to take when they want to get from South Africa to the sea. In the 1970s 40 percent of South Africa’s exports went out through Lourenço Marques, as the capital of Mozambique was then called. The situation has changed out of recognition since then.

It is hard to believe that it is only just 20 years since the Bharti group listed its telecommunications business on the Bombay Stock Exchange, soon after that bringing its cellphone operations together under the Airtel brand. At the time, just ten years from the founding of the business by Sunil Bharti Mittal, it had yet to extend its coverage to the whole of India, let alone the whole sub-continent, though by 2009 it had launched into international operations by launching a network in Sri Lanka.

Phalaborwa in Limpopo Province holds reserves of some 2.5 billion tonnes of phosphate-bearing ore, or five percent of proven world phosphate rock reserves. The Phalaborwa complex, within which Foskor’s operation is situated, is a geological intrusion caused by sub-volcanic activity approximately 2,000 million years ago. The complex is unique as it is host to many valuable minerals, the most relevant of which are phosphate, copper, zirconium, iron and vermiculite.