John Thompson was yet again the top achieving division in ACTOM in the past year. As in the previous year – and on many other occasions – it has won the Chairman’s Award for 2022/23.
John Thompson ticked all the right boxes in, firstly, achieving earnings before interest and taxes (EBIT) growth of 27% over the previous year, secondly, an extremely high cash conversion level of 68%, and thirdly, a highly impressive growth in export sales of 54%.
The division also scored very high marks on all four of the other criteria that are taken into account in measuring the performance of divisions competing for the Chairman’s Award, achieving a Level 1 black economic empowerment (BEE) rating and attaining 97% for risk management, 95.7% for environmental performance and a lost time injury frequency rate (LTIFR) of 0.4.
MV Switchgear ran a close second to John Thompson to win the Runner-up Award, followed by Engineering Projects & Contracts, LH Marthinusen and Reid & Mitchell, which were awarded Divisional Certificates of Excellence.
Andries gave notice that the competition for the forthcoming 2023/24 financial year will see the introduction of an additional criterion for judging the group’s divisions for the Chairman’s Award.
“This new factor that will be taken into account along with the existing ones is economic value-add (EVA), whereby the increase in your division’s EVA contribution during the year compared with the previous year will be measured and assessed,” he explained.
In the business units section of the current competition as many as eight business units earned recognition for putting in exceptional efforts to achieve high profit growth and good conversion of profits to cash during a year beset with many difficulties and obstacles.
This was the largest number of business units to win Business Unit Certificates of Excellence in a single year since the inception of the Chairman’s Award competition in 2012. The eight units which were accorded this honour are, in no specific order, Genlux, Contracting, Power Systems, Protection & Control, Metalplus, Electrical Machines, Electrical Products and John Thompson Utility Boilers.
Finally, the award for the best semi-technical article published in What’s Watt during the past year went to Wilma Muller, Power Transformers’ Sales Manager, for the article “Power Transformers launches unique online condition monitoring system for transformers”, which was published in the magazine’s December 2022 issue.