Africa

Tracy Bolton, who heads Microsoft South Africa’s Information Worker division, talks to Jayne Alverca about the group’s mission to optimise the user experience.

South African businesses are surprisingly well served with their computer needs and are often in the vanguard of what is new, as Alan Swaby learns.

When Y2K was looming down on businesses at the end of the century, no one was really sure if the whole house of cards would crumble or not. JJ Milner, founder and head of South Africa’s largest Microsoft hosting provider, felt that it wouldn’t; but he understood that his many clients preferred something more concrete to go on than just his gut instinct.

Over the past 42 years Avis has established an impressive average 38 per cent share of the South African car rentals market. Maintaining that position, however, requires continuous innovation and improvement, as chief executive Wayne Duvenage explains to Gay Sutton.

Shell Exploration & Production (Shell Bidco) has made an offer of £992.4 million for East Africa-focused Cove Energy.

UK-based Cove's primary asset is its 8.5 per cent stake in the Rovuma Offshore Area 1 in Mozambique, where operator Anadarko has found over 30 trillion cubic feet of natural gas. The Rovuma offshore basin is a frontier exploration area, holding large resources of natural gas reserves suitable for LNG projects.

African Minerals has received notification from China’s Shandong Iron and Steel Group that the relevant approval has now been received regarding its proposed $1.5 billion investment in African Minerals’ Tonkolili iron ore project.

The approval came from the China National Development and Reform Committee (NDRC), and African Minerals is expecting the remaining government approvals to follow shortly. The closure date for the transaction has now been extended until the end of March 2012.

SABMiller has announced it will invest US$80 million into a new brewery at its Ugandan subsidiary, Nile Breweries (NBL), doubling the company's design capacity to 3.6 million hectolitres by 2013.

The new brewery will be constructed in Mbarara in western Uganda, the fastest-growing regional beer market in the country.

Davis Langdon is a specialist in the built environment, providing cost management and procurement for engineering projects in all sectors of the economy. Rooted in Africa, it uniquely understands the needs of the continent’s booming economies.

Alan Swaby talks to the CEO of a platinum mining project in the final phase of exploration waiting to hear exactly how deep he will have to go.

They say that one man’s meat is another man’s poison. In the case of Village Main Reef Limited, the saying would fit better the other way around; but it still portrays the company’s business model of finding projects that others no longer want and turning them around into profitable, saleable assets.

Michel Maalouf, managing director of Astera Engineering, talks to Jayne Alverca about the company’s exponential success within Africa’s fastest growing telecoms market.

Tullow Oil has signed two new production sharing agreements (PSAs) with the government of Uganda, paving the way for completion of its asset sale to France’s Total and China’s CNOOC.

The new PSAs cover the EA-1 and Kanywataba licences in the Lake Albert Rift Basin. Tullow has also been awarded the production licence for the Kingfisher field, which is estimated to hold around 300 million barrels of oil.