Brand South Africa Blog

The Oprah Winfrey Show goes on hiatus in the northern summer months. BSA blog, while not yet in the same league, is taking a break until August 25.

Mark Mobius thinks SA companies are well-run and trading at nice prices.

John Mauldin is the Dallas-based president of Millennium Wave Advisers, an investment advisory firm, and a frequent visitor to SA. Last December, he was one of the US investors Jacob Zuma met when he travelled to Texas and California before being elected ANC president. He puts out a terrific newsletter, Thoughts from the Frontline. After a trip to SA in January 2007, he gave us a tremendous write-up. It has taken 18 months, but the piece has finally gone viral. It’s cropping up in in-boxes all over.  Mauldin has a South African business partner, Prieur Du Plessis, who blogs here.

Coming soon: a website — golferwines.com — dedicated to selling wines from the estates of SA’s top golfers, including David Frost, Ernie Els andf Gary Player, to US oenophiles. Click on the arrow to hear Bob Marx talking about it in his interview with Gene Burns on San Francisco’s WGO Newstalk. The full interview can be heard via the previous post.

 

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Dining Around is a San Francisco instititution. It’s a weekly radio show hosted by Gene Burns every Saturday morning on KGO Newstalk. We got a call on Friday from Burn’s producer, Joel Riddell, looking for someone to talk about SA and its wines. We suggested Robert Marx — the ex-Marine from Minnesota turned SA wine importer — and pointed to Joel to the blog item we posted on him last week. Click below to hear the results, which include a major plug for Overgauuw Sauvignon Blanc.

 

 Marx on KGO [13:01m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Learn more here.

BSA Blog, as a newcomer, has yet to draw the attention of the trolls, at home and abroad, who make it their business to rain venemously on SA’s parade. They’re a vigilant bunch and they seem to have a lot of time on their hands. Say something good about the country on the most obscure website imaginable, and if the site has a comment box, someone will use it to vent about how, actually, we’re all going to hell in a hand basket. Emma Jordan examines the phenomenon.

Toby Shapshak blogs on the cellphone banking revolution being pioneered in SA by Wizzit. Or you can watch the film.

Office Snapshots is a blog about offices. This post is about MXit’s offices between Cape Town and Stellenbosch. MXit is a great SA company that’s on the leading edge of mobile instant messaging. For views, and a lot else, Cape Town beats Silicon Valley any day. These guys are having fun.

Ray Hartley, one of the shrewdest political writers in SA, now editor of the The Times, the daily edition of the Sunday Times, finds reasons to be cheerful. Sanity is prevailing on the economy. Zimbabweans are negotiating their own future. Civil society is flexing its muscles. The comments on his blog post are, well, vigorous.

Nicky Prins, subject of an AP story about repatriating expats, is interviewed on The World, an hour long news programme heard daily on US public radio stations nationwide. Influential audience. The story has gone viral. Click below to hear the interview.

 

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Humphrey Borkum, chairman of the Johannesburg Stock Exchange, reflects on the current state of South Africa. He finds plenty to cheer about — from strong institutions and a muscular free press, to the resource boom and the Bushveld Complex, to the massive investments under way to modernise our infrastructure, to the explosion of the black middle class.

The South Florida Sun-Sentinel’s Doreen Hemlock gives last week’s trade mission to Minneapolis and Miami some ink.

The homeward bound story cited yesterday is picking up steam. It was put out by the Associated Press, not Media 24, which means it will probably keep popping up for some time now and prompt news editors to ask for matchers. The International Herald Tribune has the full version.

Bob Marx is the CEO of Minnesota-based MT Global Wines and specialises in importing South Africa wine into the US. He fell in love with the stuff while serving as a Marine guard at the American consulate in Cape Town. This year he’s on track to ship 50 container loads which works out at some 60 000 cases or about one in every 15 bottles of South African wine sold in the US. He imports wines under his own labels which are sold at two major US retail chains, Costco and Trader Joe’s. He also handles wines from a number of well known estates including Overgaauw and Oubenheim. His Overgaauw Sauvignon Blanc, which retails for $15 in the US, recently beat far pricier Marlboroughs from New Zealand in a blind tasting. Happily, I had a chance to find out why and to ask Bob how he got into the business. Click below to hear the conversation.

 

 Bob Marx [9:25m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Because South Africans do “exceptional quality work” and are “very, very innovative.” So argues Henk Touw, a native of Holland who spent 18 years managing the Europe, Middle East and Africa business of Donaldson, a Minnesota-based manufacturer of filtration equipment. Donaldson has a significant presence in SA. Henk is currentlly President of Stakeholder Satisfaction LLC. Click below to hear his take on SA. He was speaking last week to Minneapolis area business leaders at event organised by the Minnesota-SA Business Council for a visiting SA trade delegation.

 

 Henk [8:05m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Media 24 reports:

“A spokesperson for Stuttafords Van Lines, the largest moving company in South Africa, said that for every person the company moves out of South Africa to the United Kingdom, it helps another 1.5 return.”

Among the returners is economist Nicky Prins. What got to her was the film clip below.

“Sometimes I would cry when I watched it. It sort of brought the emotions to a head, and you would think, ‘I really want to go home’.”

One blogger’s take on the South African fashion scene. As he says, you’ll need to have quite a personality to compete with this outfit.

A trade and investment mission headed by Iqbal Sharma, deputy director general for trade and investment at the Department of Trade and Industry traveled to the US Midwest on Monday. Message: “China and India are on everyone’s lips. The next market that will be on everyone’s lips is Africa.” Click below to hear Sharma’s presentation to the Minnesota-South Africa Business Council in Minneapolis. Follow along with the presentation.

 

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The Economist profiles Dabba, a VoIP-based “village telco”, which has launched a low cost wireless telephone network for residents of the Orange Farm community south of Johannesburg. Dabba and its founder, Rael Lissoos were honoured in Berlin last week as Social Entrepreneur of the Year 2008. Many Possibilities blogger Steve Song, a fellow at the Shuttleworth Foundation, provides more background.