Tag: COVID-19

Pre-COVID-19, travel and tourism contributed 6.9% to South Africa’s gross domestic product, declining to 3.7% in 2020. Similarly, the number of jobs created by the sector dropped by 32.4% from 1.5 million to 987,000. It was, according to Statistics SA, bigger than agriculture, utilities and construction.

Automation is complex – especially in the manufacturing industry. Will the automation trend continue to accelerate? The adoption of automation is one of the unexpected game-changers that the COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated in manufacturing. The impact is nowhere more robust than on the shop floor.

With entrepreneurship critical to SA’s economic recovery, there are resources to help aspiring entrepreneurs get ahead. Entrepreneurship has been hailed as the key to South Africa’s economic recovery – and the good news is that all signs point to it being on the rise.

Online product research and discovery influences R293.8 billion in physical sales, accounting for 25% of South Africa’s retail trade, according to the recently released 2022 South African Digital Customer Experience (CX) Report.

South Africa’s energy shortage is having a profound impact on its cities. Economic growth and jobs continue to be affected at a time when cities urgently need to recover from the COVID-19 crisis to retain their competitiveness and attractiveness.

The impact of COVID-19 spanned many facets of the business world. The policies and controls that prevent an auditing firm from taking on the ‘wrong’ clients or kind of work fall under our Quality and Risk Management (QRM) function, and the pandemic was able to teach us many valuable lessons about compliance in this regard.

With Amazon readying itself to launch in South Africa in February 2023, forward-thinking local retailers and e-tailers are gearing up their businesses to leverage the country’s R30 billion per year e-commerce market. Globally, Amazon dominates online sales and has driven enormous disruption in the market.

Since 1994, South Africa has had five presidents who have varied greatly in style and character, despite all belonging to the same political party. How do they compare? How did they handle the crises they faced? What impact did they have on the country?

MultiChoice Group (MCG or the group) grew its user base by 5% during the period ended 30 September 2022 (1H FY23). An ongoing focus on leveraging the group’s local capabilities added 1.0 million 90-day active subscribers to close the period on 22.1 million subscribers, with the subscriber base split between 13.0 million households (59%) in the Rest of Africa and 9.1m (41%) in South Africa.

The world is emerging from the COVID-19 pandemic, more fragmented and further away from the more equal and equitable iteration imagined in 2015 when the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) were conceptualised. As we hurtle at seemingly lightning speed towards the 2030 deadline to achieve these goals, the urgency is palpable.