Tag: load shedding

For most businesses, hours without electricity are hours that revenue, resources and opportunities are lost. It is important for businesses to diversify their energy sources and battery storage has become an increasingly favourable, and in many cases, indispensable option.

Infrastructure challenges in South Africa are mounting in what is turning out to be a perfect storm. Power cuts, water shortages and potholes are all too common. The South African Institution of Civil Engineering (SAICE) highlighted these challenges in its 2022 state of infrastructure report that revealed that South Africa is at risk of becoming a “failed state”.

Nearly three quarters (73%) of CEOs believe global economic growth will decline over the next 12 months, according to our 26th Annual Global CEO Survey, which polled 4,410 CEOs in 105 countries and territories in October and November 2022.

Last year, South African businesses were spared from Eskom’s proposed 32% tariff hike, which would have come into effect from 1 April 2023, with energy regulator National Energy Regulator (NERSA) postponing its decision on this for the next two financial years.

Amidst the rising cost of living, interest rate and fuel price hikes, and load shedding, the elephant in the room remains persistently high rates of unemployment. Much fanfare tends to surround any announcement of a small decline in the quarterly unemployment rate as it did at the end of November 2022 when Statistics South Africa revealed that the official unemployment figure had decreased by one percentage point between the second and third quarters of 2022 from 33.9% to 32.9%.

As we continue to strive for a cleaner planet, governments, industries, and organisations around the world are uniting to build a sustainable future. The time is ripe to explore innovations and technologies that can work to reduce carbon emissions and help to facilitate better resource efficiency.

For banks, disruption has become business as usual. Besides the ever-changing customer expectations, banks are under pressure to defend their market share against increased competition and the digitisation of the financial services landscape by neo-banks and FinTechs.

As we move into 2023, many small and medium enterprise (SME) owners and leaders anticipate another difficult year. Yet they are comfortable knowing they've endured a lot since the start of the pandemic. SMEs have survived, and some have even thrived, despite COVID-19, unrest, extreme weather, the global energy crisis, and the return of high inflation and rising interest rates.

This year has been nothing, if not eventful. We started 2022 with Russian President, Vladimir Putin, declaring war on Ukraine. This event then triggered an energy crisis and has driven inflation, in major economies, to unprecedented levels, along with interest rates. And now, as the year draws to a close, COVID-19 has snuck in again to dominate headlines.

Working from home works pretty well for much of the cloud enabled workforce most of the time. Primarily, a reliable and secure internet connection that builds a bridge between home and the office – perhaps via your organisation’s Virtual Private Network (VPN) – was all that you needed.