The macroeconomic environment globally and in South Africa remains volatile and fluid.
South Africa continues to have major socio-economic challenges resulting from (amongst others) rising interest rates, extremely high levels of unemployment, a rapidly weakening currency and poor economic growth. We see utter chaos in many municipalities with major service delivery challenges. We need to seriously reflect on where we are and pull together as “SA Inc” to get ourselves out of this mess.
ACTOM as a group has however been able to navigate through these challenges exceptionally well – this being due mainly to the diversity of the business from a product, services and market perspective. We have concluded the financial year in March with exceptionally good results and a very good order book that positions us well for the first half of the financial year. We are very grateful to our staff for all the hard work that resulted in us achieving these results.
The company has over the past year made good strides in capital investment on the expansion of our manufacturing and services capacities. Various infrastructure projects are under way that are resulting in major demand for the group’s products and services.
During the recent Presidential Investment Summit ACTOM pledged to invest over R100-million towards the expansion of our capacity. In addition, ACTOM plans to invest over R0.5-bln in various expansion initiatives in the coming years. These comprise various expansion initiatives and the introduction of the latest technologies in our manufacturing, repairs and services businesses.
ACTOM is the perfect potential platform for the country to create jobs across our full supply chain and has the ability to assist with government’s re-industrialisation initiative for the creation of jobs. The group is very much involved in the energy transition as South Africa migrates towards renewable energy and alternative energy sources. We are currently integrally involved with the operation and maintenance of a 25MW wood-chip fired power generation plant at a customer in Mpumalanga.
As we are all aware, the challenges of load-shedding persist and we’ve embarked on alternative energy solutions at several business sites to independently obtain reliable power sources to keep our operations functional. Despite some of these challenges we need to be agile and navigate through these issues and ensure sustainability.
I’m pleased with the various developments we’ve seen through embracing digital advertising and communications platforms – the group’s new modernised website in particular – to better promote the interests of the group.
I’m happy to report that our health and safety performance has been fairly good, with our current LTIFR rate at 0.60. For this I would like to thank everybody for their continued efforts in making our workplace safer.
Finally, I’d like to say I’m very optimistic about the next six months, as we’ve seen a trend towards increased demand across most of our divisions. This will boost job creation initiatives. ACTOM is actively increasing skills development and training initiatives through its various skills training centres. Initiatives are targeted at our employees as well as communities affiliated to our operations.
It’s critical that we align skills with market demands that will ultimately positively impact towards increasing the country’s economically active population and GDP growth.
Mervyn Naidoo
