Dr PD (Dempsey) Naidoo

RECOGNITION

Dempsey Naidoo’s career spans 37 years of leadership in the infrastructure engineering and business creation and management sectors.

Dempsey graduated in the UK as a civil engineer under a UN sponsorship and was recruited as a graduate engineer in the Anglo American Corporation Civil Engineering Department in 1981. He spent his internship designing and constructing various mining infrastructure projects in water, slimes, pipelines, townships, dams and structures projects for various mines under disciplined senior supervision until he registered as a professional engineer in 1985 and simultaneously became a chartered member of the UK Institute of Civil Engineers.

In 1987, he was invited to join the Anglo American Executive Trainee Programme. Dempsey served as Executive Manager to some of the Corporation’s senior executives in the Gold, Base Metals, Diamond and Management Administration Divisions. He left the Corporation in 1996 as a Marketing Director in the Namakwa Sands Mine in the Western Cape and Executive in the Base Metals Division.

In 1996, he took the reins as CEO at the fledgling PD Naidoo Consulting Engineers Group (PDNA), which he founded as a part-time communitybased venture in 1987. In the next 10 years, until 2006, the company had grown under his direction to a 500-employee organisation with 12 offices in South Africa and four offices in Africa. During this time, the company was notable as the leading consulting BBBEE practice and won numerous technical and business leadership awards. Dempsey was also nominated as a finalist in the EY/RMB entrepreneurship programme.

The PDNA business provided specialist design and construction solutions to major local and global clients in the civil infrastructure, property, mining and resources, industrial and project management sectors. Dempsey became the first black President of CESA and sat on boards such as the South African Property Owners Association and South African Black Allied Technical Organisation, which heralded the first wave of democratic professional institution transformation in South Africa.

In 2013, the PDNA Group was sold to the UK-based Mott Macdonald Engineering Group. Dempsey served as Managing Director of the Africa Division in the Europe and Africa Unit, and was a Shareholder Board Committee Member till his retirement from this position in February 2017.

Since 2011, Dempsey has served as inaugural Chairman and Director of the JSE-listed Texton Property Fund and has been a founding director since 1996 on the board of the N3 Toll Concession. As an active entrepreneur and investor in start-up businesses – such as the AIH Automotive Group, which is about to begin contract assembly for Mahindra Motor Group, and the PD Naidoo Group, which promotes fintech solutions in the micro banking, insurance and asset management space, as well as investment in technology-relevant poverty alleviation and environmental solutions for the upliftment of the poor in South Africa – Dempsey continues to be an advocate of transformational business in South Africa and abroad.