CAPITAL: The Voice of Business Issue 1, 2015 | Page 12

EDITOR’S NOTE

This is wh
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elcome to the first edition of Capital, the Pietermaritzburg Chamber of Business’s new magazine.
We come to you at an interesting time. Load
shedding in South Africa has become an accepted
fact, we’ve just picked our jaws up off the floor after the SONA
shenanigans, and we’re now waiting with bated breath to see
what kind of shape we’re going to be in, post budget speech.
If you believe everything you read, you could be forgiven
for thinking we’re all going to hell in a hand basket. But while
all this macro stuff has been going on, ordinary folk have been
getting on with the job. It is their stories that we intend to focus
on with this magazine, because in this area of KwaZulu-Natal there
are people doing things that defy the prevailing perceptions. Like
the winners of our Nedbank PCB Business of the Year awards starting
on page 60. The winner in the services category of the competition, Pietermaritzburg born and bred Midlands Medical Centre, is busy doubling its
footprint in the city at a cost of around R150 million. The manufacturing category winner, Pressure Die Castings (PDC), has meanwhile managed to gain 30%
more business in the past year by “reshoring” work that South Africa had lost to
other countries. It’s a testament to the company’s global competitiveness, made
even more remarkable by its revelation that energy usage per ton at the company has been reduced by almost 40%.
Energy is, of course, a very topical issue in the country right now. So it comes
as great news that while the country struggles to meet demand, the Msunduzi
municipality has managed to resolve many of the supply problems related to
aging infrastructure and has stabilised Pietermaritzburg’s network. At the same
time, the PCB came up with an elegantly simple solution to the other threat to a
stable electricity supply – illegal connections. Read more about this on page 36.
On page 20, we take a look at how local companies continue to streamline their
businesses, when we go to the gemba with “Lean thinking” sensei, Dr Michael
Ballé. Ballé pulled no punches when he toured local factories, which makes
his comments to me after the day’s events even more pertinent.

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