Investments in South Africa\u2019s infrastructure that couldn\u2019t be completed last year because of political uncertainty are among deals that are now on the cusp of getting done, said the chief executive officer of Nedbank Group.<\/p>\n
Mike Brown\u2019s confidence reflects improving sentiment since Cyril Ramaphosa replaced the embattled Jacob Zuma as the country\u2019s president last month. The government is trying to resolve policy uncertainty in South Africa\u2019s crucial mining industry while getting renewable energy projects underway again.<\/p>\n
“The front-end of those transactions would be infrastructure-type transactions, in particular, in South Africa, the renewable-energy deals,” Brown, whose bank is controlled by Old Mutual, said in an interview in London on Thursday.<\/p>\n
Nedbank plans to \u201cwork alongside certain state-owned enterprises, that have previously been starved of funding, to rehabilitate them,\u201d he said, emphasizing cash-strapped power utility Eskom Holdings SOC Ltd and loss-making South African Airways.<\/p>\n
Brown has been part of the CEO Initiative, which was started to help the government rescue the economy after Zuma fired his finance minister at the end of 2015.<\/p>\n
With Ramaphosa, “we are significantly more confident about the future of South Africa,” Brown said. “The fact that we have new leadership doesn\u2019t mean the challenges have gone away, obviously, but I think we\u2019re much more capable of dealing with them.”<\/p>\n
Here\u2019s more of what Brown had to say:<\/p>\n
On land reform:<\/strong><\/p>\n “I still have a large amount of confidence in the ability of the leadership in government, working alongside civil society and business, to craft a solution.”<\/p>\n “We would absolutely expect that all of the banks, as interested parties, and the banking association, plus many many other interested parties, would be part of this process.”<\/p>\n On Eskom<\/strong><\/p>\n “We believe that the new board of Eskom is a very credible board and is the start of a process of fixing Eskom, starting with Eskom\u2019s governance.”<\/p>\n “Shortly after the appointment of the new board, Eskom came to a banking consortium and asked for a R20 billion ($1.7-billion) loan. Nedbank, some of the other South African banks and the international banks, all provided that loan to Eskom. We would not have done that without the change in leadership.”<\/p>\n On investment banking<\/strong><\/p>\n “We\u2019ve seen a huge amount of interest in South African financial markets in the last two to three months. And on the back of that, we\u2019d expect a pick-up in M&A activity.”<\/p>\n “There’ll be a lot of work being done by many bankers on what\u2019s the longer-term future of the state-owned enterprises.”<\/p>\n “Mining is further out in terms of a pick-up in activity, you\u2019re unlikely to see significant investment until a revised mining charter is finalized.”<\/p>\n On the economy<\/strong><\/p>\n We’re “significantly better off than we were in November”.<\/p>\n “All you have to do is look at the strength of the currency and the strength of the bond market. It\u2019s certainly not pricing in a downgrade.”<\/p>\n Read:<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Investments in South Africa\u2019s infrastructure that couldn\u2019t be completed last year because of political uncertainty are among deals that are now on the cusp of getting done, said the chief executive officer of Nedbank Group.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":59,"featured_media":53593,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[961],"tags":[26,1799,1110],"class_list":["post-233675","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-banking","tag-headline","tag-nedbank","tag-old-mutual"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/233675","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/59"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=233675"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/233675\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":233683,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/233675\/revisions\/233683"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/53593"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=233675"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=233675"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=233675"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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