By Alec Hogg
Yesterday’s financials from RCL confirmed a continuing recovery with a 52% jump in headline earnings per share for the year to end June. Its well documented re-engineering of Rainbow Chickens has delivered impressive returns. Not as well known, but equally impressive, is how the business is adapting to SA’s challenge of higher cost electricity and water scarcity.
Last year, the owner of Selati sugar, Ouma’s rusks and Bobtail dog food invested R56m in buying half of Matzonox, an innovative company which uses waste water from RCL’s Worcester chicken plant to generate electricity (and reduce water consumption). The project has been so successful RCL is now investing R300m in a similar project at its Rustenburg operations.
Ingenuity of this kind is pretty common in the private sector where necessity is often the mother of invention. Make something too expensive or scarce, and businesses will soon find an alternative. But this reality often escapes those in the public sector.
Witness the misguided tariff-calculating team at Eskom, whose business is feeling the pinch after sales of electricity have fallen in five of the last six years. With projects like RCL’s Matzonox becoming more popular, Eskom’s already deep pit of despair is likely to get ever deeper. Even without more McKinseys and Guptas.
