Luke Jedeikin and Claude Hanan are well known for founding Superbalist, the online fashion store bought in 2014 by Takealot Group.

Now the pair has embarked on a new venture, launched in The Foschini Group (TFG) stable, called Bash, and they tell Duncan McLeod on the TechCentral Show (TCS) all about it.

To start the discussion, Hanan and Jedeikin talk about the origin of Superbalist – it began life as a group-buying deals site akin to Groupon. They then chat about how the big Takealot deal happened and what it meant for Superbalist.

The conversation them turns to how the TFG opportunity came about and what the JSE-listed retail group is hoping to achieve with the launch of Bash – it’s online at bash.com. They also explain why they chose the name Bash and what was involved in securing a four-letter dot-com domain.

Among many other topics, Jedeikin and Hanan provide their views on:

• The state of e-commerce in South Africa;

• Why Bash is a mobile-first app shopping destination – it also works fine on the web;

• The complexities of selling fashion online; and

• The competitive landscape in South Africa and how it’s evolving.

Don’t miss a fascinating discussion!

What does the future hold for e-commerce in South Africa? Takealot Group CEO Mamongae Mahlare joins the TechCentral Show (TCS) to unpack this and more.

In the interview, Mahlare talks about her career background and how she came to Takealot. She also discusses:

• The transformative impact of the Covid-19 pandemic, how it drove up online shopping and why it’s impact is still being felt.

• Takealot Group’s slowing growth – why it’s happening, and what it says about the e-commerce space in South Africa.

• The impact of increased competition from traditional retailers embracing internet commerce.

• The Competition Commission’s investigation into online markets, and why the authorities need to tread carefully.

• The rumoured launch later this year of an Amazon marketplace in South Africa, and how this will impact the market and Takealot.

• What will shape the development of e-commerce in South Africa in the coming years.

• The role, if any, for the Post Office in e-commerce fulfilment.

Don’t miss a fascinating discussion.

Volvo Cars, part of Sweden’s Volvo Group, has seen a big growth in interest in electric vehicles from the South African motoring public – and the company hopes the introduction early next year of its most affordable EV yet, the EX30, will accelerate that.

That’s according to Volvo Cars South Africa MD Greg Maruszewski, who was speaking to Duncan McLeod on the TechCentral Show (TCS) – watch or listen to the interview below.

Volvo has been one of the most aggressive car manufacturers in pivoting from internal combustion engines to electric motors. Indeed, it said two years ago already that it intends to become a fully electric car company by 2030.

In this episode of TCS, Maruszewski unpacks:

• Volvo’s transition to EVs and its strategy around electro-mobility;

• What South Africans think about EVs, and why they’re warming to the concept;

• Where Volvo is positioned in the car market, and why some of its newer models, like the XC30, are aimed at a younger audience;

• Volvo’s expectations for the EX30 compact sports utility vehicle in the local market, and more details about the new model – including performance, battery range, integrated technology and pricing, which is expected to start at about R776 000;

• Volvo’s relationship with Google;

• The development of charging infrastructure in South Africa;

• What government could be doing to encourage greater EV adoption; and

• The future of the cars – what can we expect in the coming years?

Don’t miss a fascinating interview!

Bryan Hattingh, CEO of Cycan, is well-known in South Africa’s technology industry for his leadership coaching and for helping companies find top talent.

Hattingh joins Duncan McLeod on the TechCentral Show (TCS) to discuss what he believes is required of leadership in a post-Covid world – hint: it’s not more of the same.

He discusses a range of issues in the interview, including:

• How the pandemic changed what’s required of business leaders;

• How companies can maintain their unique cultures in the era of remote working;

• What artificial intelligence means for the modern workplace;

• What works best – hybrid, remote or in-office only – and why;

• Why companies might not be measuring success correctly – it should go beyond regular reporting on financial metrics such as Heps and Ebitda;

• How firms can help employees find meaning and satisfaction in the workplace; and

• The emigration wave in South Africa and its impact on the country.

Don’t miss a great discussion!

It’s been just over 20 years since Andile Ngcaba quit his government job – he was director-general of communications – and became an investor in the technology sector.

Now, in an interview with Duncan McLeod on the TechCentral Show (TCS), Ngcaba looks back at the past two decades, the formation of Convergence Partners, the investments the business has made and why, and its focus areas.

Ngcaba, who splits his time between Africa and Silicon Valley – where he has a home – unpacks the recent announcement that Convergence Partners Investments is rebranding as Solcon Capital and has appointed a new CEO, Pramod Venkatesh, and why its focus has been broadened beyond Africa to both developing and developed markets.

“Under this new brand, Solcon will focus on international deep tech investments in generative AI and large language models, synthetic data and big data, cybersecurity, and quantum computing across South Africa, India and Southeast Asia, leveraging scale through platform economics,” Solcon said in a statement last week.

Also in this TCS interview, Ngcaba talks about:

• What he has learnt from his time in Silicon Valley, and why it’s not easy to replicate the Valley model in other parts of the model. “It’s more a state of mind,” Ngcaba tells TechCentral.

• What he set out to achieve when he started Convergence Partners.

• The highlights of the investments the company has made over the years.

• What excites him the technology space today, and why.

The original Convergence Partners pitch presentation to investor Nedbank, which Ngcaba talks about in the opening minutes of the interview, is available to download on TechCentral's website.

Don’t miss a wide-ranging and fascinating discussion!

Following the recent decision to rebrand MTN GlobalConnect as Bayobab, founder and CEO Frédéric Schepens joins the TechCentral Show (TCS) to chat about the telecommunications infrastructure provider’s expansion plans.

Bayobab, which owns stakes in a number of subsea cable systems and other telecoms infrastructure, is the result of “change under way to position the business as a world-class, Africa-focused open-access digital infrastructure platform serving not just MTN but other third parties as customers”, MTN Group CEO Ralph Mupita said in May.

“We are also going to bring in strategic partners into the business over time who will provide skills and capital to support and accelerate the growth of this business.”

In this episode of TCS, Schepens unpacks all the infrastructure that Bayobab owns, the huge investments it is making in subsea and terrestrial fibre in Africa, and where the company expects to direct its capital spending in the years ahead.

Telkom is facing difficult times, but CEO Serame Taukobong has insisted the company “does not need a knight in shining armour” to come riding to its rescue.

In this TechCentral Show (TCS) interview with Taukobong, the Telkom boss provides his views on the interest received from a consortium that includes former CEO Sipho Maseko and Mauritius-based Axian Telecom, as well as MTN Group signalling that it, too, may still be interested in a deal.

MTN walked away from early stage talks with Telkom last year after the latter’s board agreed to entertain a rival offer from wireless broadband provider Rain, which had sought a merger with Telkom. But this week, during Telkom’s annual results presentation to. Investors, MTN issued a statement in which it said a deal makes sense for shareholders of both entities.

In the interview, at the JSE in Sandton, Taukobong answered several pressing questions:

• Without corporate action, can Telkom survive and thrive in the longer term?

• How supportive is government towards a partial or full sale of Telkom?

• How will market consolidation likely happen and can South Africa’s mobile market sustain four infrastructure competitors in Telkom, Vodacom, MTN and Rain?

• Are the retrenchments at Telkom over, or is there still more pain to come?

• What’s the prognosis for capital expenditure at Telkom, and why did mobile spending outpace revenue growth?

• What’s hurting Telkom’s free cash flow (a negative R2.7-billion in the 2023 financial year), and what is management doing to address the problem?

• Does it still make sense for Telkom to own an IT services business?

• What are the plans to unlock shareholder value, especially in Gyro?

Don’t miss the discussion!

Senior Altron executive Collin Govender is passionate about leadership – and believes South Africa needs much more of it if it is to solve its myriad challenges.

Govender – who started his career as a forklift operator in a Durban warehouse and who today heads two important businesses in the Altron stable, Altron Systems Integration and Altron Karabina – joins Duncan McLeod on the TechCentral Show (TCS) to discuss the topic.

The conversation starts with a discussion about Govender’s career in IT, which included 17 years at T-Systems, and how the Altron opportunity (now opportunities, after he took the reins at Systems Integration in addition to his role leading Karabina) came about.

He also unpacks his plans for Altron Systems Integration, where it is positioned in the market and the opportunity for acquisitions – and why systems integration has become a scale game.

The conversation then turns to leadership, and the role it plays in business and society. Govender talks about his own management style, and also shares his insights into why he believes South Africa’s biggest problems flow from a lack of decisive and accountable leadership. The fix can be applied to business and politics. But what will it take? Govender’s ideas deserve attention.

The State IT Agency (Sita), government’s central IT procurement and services agency, has been through the wringer.

The entity, created in 1999, has been plagued for much of its existence by oftentimes poor leadership and well as widespread corruption – detailed in a 2017 TechCentral interview former CEO Setumo Mohapi.

Now, after several years without a CEO – the company had been placed into a form of administration by former communications minister Stella Ndabeni-Abrahams – Bongani Mabaso has taken the reins. Mabaso, previously a senior IT executive at Standard Bank Group, is promising to shake things up at Sita - by fixing what’s broken and focusing on service delivery to its government clients.

Mabaso, who has a PhD in machine ethics and computational morality from the University of Pretoria and a BSc in engineering from the University of Cape Town, tells Duncan McLeod in this episode of the TechCentral Show (TCS) about his plan to turn around the troubled entity.

In the interview, Mabaso speaks about:

• The direction he intends to take Sita in and why;

• How artificial intelligence could be used in Sita’s procurement processes – and how it could help stamp out corruption in tenders;

• His strategic plan, and how he will measure its success;

• The IT skills shortage in the public sector and why it's at crisis levels;

• The announcement by communications minister Mondli Gungubele that Sita will build a R6-billion broadband network – much of this work is already, in fact, happening; and

• The impact of load shedding on public sector IT systems.

The rise and fall of Nokia’s mobile phone business has been well documented. Once dominant in the feature-phone era, the Finnish company was caught flat-footed by the launch of Apple’s iPhone and Google’s Android.

The acquisition of Nokia’s handset business by Microsoft – desperate at the time for its Windows Phone operating system to be a meaningful third player in smartphone software and also desperate for Nokia not to embrace Google’s Android – went awry.

Eventually, Microsoft exited the phone business entirely, selling the phone business back to Nokia (whose main business is selling telecommunications gear to network operators), writing off billions of dollars in the process, and leaving the mobile OS market as a virtual duopoly controlled by Apple and Google.

But the Nokia phone brand never went away. After the Microsoft collapse, a team ex-Nokia executives founded HMD Global, a Chinese-Finnish phone maker, and licensed the Nokia brand name to continue building smartphones – this time running Android.

In this episode of the TechCentral Show (TCS), Duncan McLeod is joined in TechCentral’s Johannesburg studio by Patrick Henchie, head of product and operations at HMD Global in sub-Saharan Africa, to unpack some of the history of the Nokia brand, how HMD got its start, the company’s market focus, and what’s coming next from the firm in both handsets and tablets.

In this TCS interview, Henchie talks about:

• His favourite legacy Nokia phone and why he loved it;

• HMD’s relationship with Google;

• Why the company does not compete directly with Apple and Samsung in top-tier flagship devices, preferring instead to cater to the mid-market and entry-level tiers;

• The Nokia phone line-up: the C series, G series and X series, and where they fit in HMD’s portfolio and in the market;

• What South Africans think of the Nokia brand today; and

• Why HMD still makes feature phones.

Don’t miss a fascinating discussion about a storied brand.