Tag: BusinessResilience

The prospect of South Africa losing its benefits under the African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA) understandably raises concerns. Preferential access matters, particularly where exporters operate on tight margins. However, businesses should not respond to headlines alone. Instead, they should understand their exposure, preserve viable customer relationships and accelerate expansion into other markets.

Black Friday has evolved. What was once a single day of discount-driven frenzy now stretches across weeks of promotional activity. Businesses widely describe this period as Black November. This shift is quietly changing the question South African ecommerce businesses need to ask. What we tend to ask before Black Friday is how businesses can generate more sales. But an equally important question is what happens if all those sales actually arrive.

South African businesses have learned to work through all kinds of disruptions. One week, they face a port backlog. The next, they deal with a water interruption or a shortage of essential natural resources. These slowdowns put pressure on production, teams, and the people responsible for keeping operations moving. When a business relies mainly on a permanent workforce, these disruptions hit even harder.

South Africa loses nearly half (47.3%) of all municipal water supplied through leaks, infrastructure failures, and other non-revenue losses. Meanwhile, copper theft costs the economy an estimated R45 billion a year. Road maintenance backlogs also exceed R197 billion. These problems reflect the increasingly interconnected nature of South Africa’s infrastructure systems. Consequently, disruptions to electricity or water supplies, road deterioration and stormwater drainage failures can quickly escalate.

Cyber risk is no longer a peripheral IT issue in African supply chains. Instead, it is becoming a core operational threat. According to the Association of Chartered Certified Accountants (ACCA), 70% of organisations report experiencing fraud or economic crime. Cyber-enabled fraud ranks among the fastest-growing categories globally, according to the ACCA Global Economic Crime and Fraud Survey.

South African businesses have evolved alongside the reality of the country’s physical infrastructure challenges. Organisations instinctively build redundancies for power. These include solar installations, battery backup solutions, UPS systems and generators. When the grid fails, the failover system kicks in. Similarly, most businesses have multiple connectivity failovers because they understand operational disruption intimately.

Today’s business environment is no longer defined by a single shock but by overlapping geopolitical and economic disruptions reshaping the macroeconomic landscape. Businesses are operating amid a polycrisis, where conflict, trade tensions, inflationary pressure and supply chain instability continue to reinforce uncertainty.

South Africa’s Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) face increasing pressure to grow cautiously. Economic volatility, rising operating costs and stubbornly high unemployment continue to reshape hiring decisions across the small business sector.

A practical guide to working on your business - helping founders and leaders build organisations that perform well, act with integrity and endure.‎ Many entrepreneurs, founders, executives and board members spend their days immersed in urgent business demands. They solve problems, manage teams and respond to constant operational pressures. However, the greatest challenge for any enterprise involves learning how to step back and work on the business, not only in it.

As we enter the second quarter of 2026, South Africa’s economy faces a critical test. SA’s hard-won recovery now confronts significant pressure. A global energy shock has triggered a sharp rise in living costs. Fuel prices continue to surge. Consequently, logistics-driven inflation now affects the entire consumer landscape.