Business

South Africa’s famous township of Soweto now has its own business school, where needy but deserving young people will be taught entrepreneurship, life skills and self-confidence.

The South African National Roads Agency is to raise a further R25-billion in debt finance for upgrades and freeway construction projects over the next two years.

The CME Group, the world's largest and most diverse derivatives exchange has struck a deal with South Africa's JSE Limited to license CME's benchmark corn futures settlement prices, thereby creating a new class of JSE cash-settled corn futures contracts.

Pan-African cellular operator MTN and fixed-line operator Neotel are to jointly build a R2-billion, 5 000km fibre-optic cable network connecting major centres across South Africa with the Seacom and Eassy undersea cables that will land in KwaZulu-Natal, in a move expected to slash local telecoms costs further.

Nthato Motlana, who passed away on Sunday, gave his life to helping others. He played an active role in the struggle against apartheid, and had several firsts for black business under his belt.

By the year 2012, 485-million people in Africa, or 38% of the continent’s population, will be mobile phone users, it was revealed at the 11th AfricaCom conference held in Cape Town in November.

Vodacom has unveiled a R100-million state-of-the-art data centre in Johannesburg. The 1 000 square metre facility has the capacity to host up to 20 000 dedicated client servers or up to 650 000 virtual machines, allowing companies to do away with their own costly data centres.

Telkom is to acquire the whole of Mweb Africa and 75% of Mweb Namibia from two Naspers group companies for US$63-million, as part of its strategy to become a pan-African integrated ICT services provider.

Eskom has secured a 20-year, US$500-million loan from the African Development Bank to help finance its programme to rehabilitate South Africa's electricity network and double the country's generation capacity.

Telkom has announced the sale of a 15% stake in cellular operator Vodacom, worth R22.5-billion, to multinational cellular operator Vodafone. The deal, one of South Africa's largest recent foreign direct investments, will also see Vodacom becoming one of the largest South African companies listed on the JSE.