Key takeaways from EICN Johannesburg’s CxO luncheon

Article tags AfricaBusinessSouth AfricaBusiness, Industry

EICN Johannesburg recently hosted a senior group of business leaders at a roundtable breakfast at Four Seasons Hotels and Resorts Westcliff Hotel. During the roundtable, our Sub-Saharan Africa Director, Sam Rolland was joined by Siemens Healthineers CEO Ayanda Swana, PepsiCo’s Director of Public Policy and Government Affairs Zolile Ntukwana, Huhtamaki’s VP for Middle East, Africa and South America Richard Trickett, Cummins’ Director of Transformation Avonisha Parsotham and Unilever’s VP of Customer Development Darryn Bassa.

Interestingly, a number of key trends have been consistently emerging out of business in the past few months:

• Supply chains – supply chains remain a significant risk to operations, and businesses have had to take steps to protect the value chain, including making investments in local warehousing to hold greater inventories, at the cost of margins.
• Competitiveness – More and more, multinationals are looking to shift production to favourable environments, and Africa is becoming more attractive (particularly over South Africa). Government will need to be cognisant of this now to ensure it retain SA’s ranking in Africa.
• Talent retention –  Driving innovation requires highly skilled talent, and the current economic and socio-economic situation in the country constrains the ability of corporates to retain this talent. Creative methods will have to be used to keep SA as an attractive destination to live and work.

Tue, 02nd Aug 2022 Article tags AfricaBusinessSouth AfricaBusiness, Industry