By Colin McClelland
South Africa will face another recession by year’s end if the Eskom load shedding debacle isn’t remedied, according to forecasts by Bank of America Merrill Lynch.
GDP growth will plummet by year’s end and signal a recession, which is two quarters of sub-zero growth, Michael Jacks, head of equity research in Johannesburg at Bank of America Merrill Lynch, told reporters on March 20 in the city’s Rosebank area.
Google has apologised to Ghana’s finance ministry and central bank for displaying a wrong exchange rate for the Ghanaian currency, the cedi, on its currency converter.
On Friday, Google’s currency converter said it took 22 cedis to buy one US dollar, when the correct rate was four times less.
Google said in a letter to the ministry and bank that the error occurred because of a “minor glitch” but was “quickly fixed”.
Nigeria also suffered a similar fate last month.
Continue reading “Google apologises for Ghanaian cedi mistake”
By Selam Gebrekidan
Last week, a brand-new Boeing 737 Max 8 crashed shortly after takeoff in Ethiopia. Five months earlier, an identical Boeing model crashed in Indonesia. With investigators looking into the possibility that a design flaw played a role in both disasters, the company is in a harsh spotlight.
Like Boeing, Ethiopian Airlines has long been held in high regard. It maintains a young fleet, and it operates a respected aviation school.
The airline has been intertwined with Boeing for six decades. It was the first African airline to buy its jets, with a loan from the American government. And over the years, it has maintained such close ties with Boeing that it did not purchase planes from rival Airbus until three years ago.
Continue reading “Can Ethiopia’s Long Love Affair With Boeing Survive the 737 Max Crash?”
By Phillip de Wet , Business Insider SA
Burger King outlets are losing it an increasing amount of money, the chain’s South African parent company Grand Parade Investments (GPI) said on Monday morning – but it is not backing down on plans to roll out a lot more of them.
A month ago GPI announced that it will liquidate Dunkin Donuts and the American ice cream brand Baskin Robbins in South Africa, after it could not make them profitable nor find a buyer interested in taking them over.
But things will be very different with Burger King. In interim results for the last half of 2018, GPI said it will roll out 15 new Burger King outlets every year for the next three years, which will increase its footprint by exactly half, to 135 stores.
By Tony Schick and Conrad Wilson
Roseburg Forest Products, one of the country’s leading manufacturers of particleboard and plywood, has ended production and sales of certain lumber products in the midst of a federal investigation into whether the wood came from the illegal logging of African rainforests.
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement confirmed to OPB that its Homeland Security Investigations division has an ongoing investigation into illegal imports of okoumé, a wood used for plywood and veneer siding. The Lacey Act prohibits the trade of plants and wildlife taken, stored or transported illegally.
Okoumé hardwood trees grow in the rainforests of west-central Africa, where the deforestation of habitat for endangered species is drawing the concern of conservationists and scientists alike. Okoumé is used in some of Roseburg’s Real Wood Siding products, which are sold by major retailers including Home Depot and marketed as “environmentally friendly.”
Continue reading “Feds Investigate Oregon Company’s African Rainforest Hardwood Products”
Gray Matters Capital, a US-based impact investor focused on the funding for-profit social enterprises in markets of Africa, India, Latin America, USA and South East Asia, has announced the names of the start-ups which have made it to the second cohort of its GMC Calibrator Program.
The GMC Calibrator is a Digital Self-learning to Earning Accelerator launched by Gray Matters Capital in April 2018 with an aim to make the mobile phone a device to promote Self Learning to Earning by improving user engagement, monetization and optimization of mobile learning platforms. This is done by understanding and implementing the principles of behavioural science and data driven decision making.
The cohort of March 2019 of the program has two start-ups from Africa – Sierra Leone based Mobile Learning Platform for Financial Inclusion Mosabi and Kenya s leading Parenting Website Mums Village joining seven other start-ups from India and Vietnam.