ICT

Retailers are pouring money into digital infrastructure.

Ever since Covid-19 turbocharged online shopping, retailers have been racing to get ahead in the digital game.

Figures released in September 2023 showed Takealot, a local service majority owned by Naspers, topping the polls in traffic, followed by two international giants in Shein and Amazon. An interesting entry at number four was Bash, the e-commerce platform of TFG, formerly known as the Foschini Group. More than 500 brands can be purchased using TFGMoney, a bank account created with TymeBank. Other successful e-commerce retail operations include Sixty60 (Checkers), Massmart (Makro, Game and Builders) and the JD Group (Everyshop).

TFG is building a 75 000m² distribution centre in Gauteng with the intention of delivering 70% of all its online sales, and all of its fashion items, through that single site.

As South Africa joins the global trend towards online shopping, data centres are going up all over the country. The latest to join the trend is software company Oracle which has chosen Johannesburg as the headquarters of its African cloud region. All of the company’s cloud regions (data centres) worldwide will be 100% powered by renewable energy by 2025. Teraco stores data in Johannesburg, Durban and Cape Town while Africa Data Centre (ADC), part of the Liquid Telecom Group, has purchased a Tier IV data centre in Johannesburg.

In 2022 Oracle announced an interconnect service between itself and Microsoft Azure data centres. This allows customers of both companies to export data from one to the other at no cost. The companies are competing with Google Cloud and Amazon Web Services (AWS), among others.

AWS announced at the 2023 South Africa Investment Conference that its investment plan for South Africa to the end of 2029 amounts to R46-billion. By the end of 2022, R15.6-billion had already been invested. The AWS Africa Region was created in 2020 when AWS opened a data centre in Cape Town.

The Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) in Pretoria will host a new body aimed at preparing South Africa for the Fourth

Online Resources

Business Process Enabling SA: www.bpesa.org.za

Independent Communications Authority: www.icasa.org.za Technology Innovation Agency: www.tia.org.za

Sector Insight

Amazon Web Services will spend R46-billion in South Africa.

Industrial Revolution (4IR), the South African Affiliate Centre of the World Economic Forum.

South Africa has not only been home to many pioneering banking apps on mobile phones, but the country’s operators continue to offer unprecedented innovation and levels of service. Arthur Goldstuck noted these trends in September 2022, further pointing out that the Reserve Bank will also speed up EFTs between banks with the introduction of a Rapid Payments Programme. Bank Zero not only uses biometric authentication for logging in, but offers zero-cost banking. Both MTN and Vodacom are offering much more sophisticated apps than when they first ventured into fintech: MTN MoMo has diverse offerings and VodaPay encompasses payment, lending, insurance and cash for emergencies. ■