Africa Inc. 2024 Part 2

The first Africa Inc. communication sent in April this year mentioned that 38 African countries had signed the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) agreement, which has since increased to 54 countries. Business Day recently reported that AfCFTA secretary general, Wamkele Mene, had announced that the adjustment fund, which facilitates trade between countries, has secured US$1bn in liquid capital and aims to raise a further US$10bn. The World Bank estimates that the implementation of AfCFTA will boost regional income by 7% or US$450bn, and 4,500 products have been identified for trade under the agreement.

Another boost for continental trade is the establishment of the Cairo headquartered African Import and Export Bank which provides, amongst a broad range of trade services, a facility for the settlement of trade transactions in local currencies as opposed to the US$.

The Industrial Development Corporation of South Africa is leading by example with 21 investments in 7 Southern African countries with a value of R6bn, 8 investments in 5 East African countries valued at R3.4bn and 5 investments in 3 West African countries valued at R2.7bn.

Everything starts with information, and we have seen an uptick in international purchases of industry reports from our store, and an increased interest in subscriptions to our database services from other countries on the continent.

As you are aware, our subscribers direct the industry research, and we have seen a surge in requests for industries on the continent outside of South Africa. This year we have published reports on legal services in Southern, East and West Africa, tourism in Mozambique, mining in Botswana and financial services in Mauritius. In the final stages of production are reports on agribusiness in Kenya, ports and harbours in Africa (with focus on Namibia and Mozambique, but including Kenya, Ghana, Tanzania, Côte d’Ivoire, Djibouti, Egypt, Morocco and Nigeria), agribusiness in Botswana and the tobacco industry in Mozambique. Reports being allocated include energy (petroleum and gas) in Namibia, ocean and coastal fishing in Namibia, agribusiness in Ethiopia, sea and coastal water transport in Ghana and the wholesale and retail of food in Tanzania.

On a related matter, we recently contracted with a researcher in Tanzania who only had a local bank account with no access to other payment systems. The onerous foreign payments procedures required by the bank delayed payment of her invoice by more than a month. In Namibia, one could make rand payments to a Namibian account before September this year, but this has now been withdrawn. This does not appear to be in the spirit of AfCFTA, and perhaps regulation in this regard needs to be reviewed.

ENHANCEMENTS:

• Value chain navigation:

The new WOWEB ‘value chain’ capability mentioned in the last communication went live on November 1 at no additional cost to subscribers.. This new functionality allows WOWEB users to more easily identify supply and demand industries associated with a specified sector.  It is broadly based on information sourced from Stats SA depicting the economy’s structure and is geared towards enabling users to consider industries and companies based on their position in a value chain, thus facilitating the identification of potential new target markets or suppliers or other opportunities that may be less obvious, as well as the identification of potential risk. 

• Branches:

Since the start of this year, we’ve expanded our research focus to cover branches more comprehensively.  While this is a time-consuming work in progress, the past few months saw an additional 10 000+ branches added to the database.  Notable examples include:

WOWEB users can access branches via a company profile’s corporate structures’ tab, and we’ve recently added Excel exporting capability.  The Excel extracts include physical address information for many of the branches:

In closing, we are implementing a process to separate strategic holdings from investments for returns on behalf of asset manager and private equity firms profiled, which will present those holdings accordingly on WOWEB. We will inform you once this is live on WOWEB.