BlackBerry didn’t lose as a result of it ignored peculiar clients. It misplaced whereas it was profitable them over. Its low-cost pay as you go information plan, launched by Vodacom in December 2008, opened BlackBerry to thousands and thousands of South Africans who couldn’t afford a month-to-month contract. Then Apple constructed a general-purpose cellphone on infrastructure that already existed, with an ecosystem BlackBerry couldn’t match.
BlackBerry misplaced as a result of its system couldn’t change when the market did. A general-purpose product can swallow a specialist each time it could do the specialist’s job nearly as effectively.
A specialist enterprise survives solely the place peculiar expertise genuinely can’t do the job: the place the asset can’t carry a smartphone, the setting defeats regular sensors, or the terrain breaks regular sign protection. Three circumstances determine the place that holds: tools unfold over a large space, the place bodily checks are costly and unreliable; weak or lacking native back-office methods; and a considerable amount of priceless however unconnected tools in locations a smartphone-based resolution merely doesn’t attain.
None of that is distinctive to South Africa – the identical circumstances apply throughout a lot of sub-Saharan Africa and past. Utilized truthfully, the check guidelines out most of what will get counted as alternative within the massive internet-of-things (IoT) market forecasts.
Analyst agency Omdia forecasts 35.6 million African units linked by cell networks by 2030, for mobile connections alone, earlier than counting the tools that runs on cheaper, non-mobile wi-fi as a substitute. Add utility meters, farm tools, supply vehicles and manufacturing facility tools throughout 54 African nations, and the Omdia determine isn’t a ceiling – it’s a flooring, and a low one.
Logistics: a R577-million downside with no platform
South Africa’s connectivity layer is being constructed. Vodacom paid R1-billion for an organization referred to as IoT.nxt in 2019, and now runs methods for Eskom and different massive shoppers. MTN constructed a market referred to as Chenosis, meant to open the mid-market to outdoors builders. Each are actual investments with a said objective, however the hole between saying an open developer ecosystem and outdoors builders truly constructing on it often takes years to shut, not months. That hole, in the midst of the market, just isn’t an accident. It’s an issue neither operator is ready as much as remedy by itself.
South Africa’s trucking business loses extra money to theft than its personal numbers can correctly present. Over the 18 months to June 2022, business group Tapa recorded 2 670 cargo theft incidents throughout all 9 provinces, with documented losses of R577-million drawn from solely 3.4% of victims who shared monetary information. The actual whole is probably going far greater. Trucking makes up 9-10% of South Africa’s economic system and employs greater than one million individuals.
The issue isn’t a scarcity of monitoring units. Fleet monitoring already exists and will get defeated routinely: GPS jammers that blind a tracker with out touching the truck, criminals posing as police to power a cease, cast paperwork used to gather items from a warehouse that ought to by no means have launched them. What’s lacking is a trusted, real-time file proving three issues: that the proper items left the proper place, that they arrived undamaged and that fee was robotically triggered on confirmed supply. That hole sits between two issues – one the finance chief owns, one the operations chief owns.
Why hasn’t somebody constructed this already? At a latest business convention, Tom Kruger of Hussar Safety Options made the purpose instantly: you can’t introduce new expertise into an business with no shared coordination throughout corporations first. Each massive operator builds monitoring for its personal fleet. No one has constructed a shared, trusted commonplace throughout competing operators, as a result of no single firm has a industrial purpose to construct infrastructure its rivals then use free of charge. A peer-reviewed examine of South Africa’s ports, primarily based on 24 interviews and two business workshops, discovered precisely this sample.
One massive operator already has a lot of the items, constructed for itself. DSV, after taking up DB Schenker in 2025, runs a platform referred to as myDSV providing proof of supply, cargo milestones tied to invoicing, and GPS monitoring marketed explicitly as theft safety. That covers two of the three lacking features. But it surely solely covers DSV’s personal fleet and clients. A shared commonplace throughout each operator would let clients examine DSV in opposition to smaller rivals on equal footing – the other of what the platform is presently used for.
That leaves two stay prospects. DSV, now significantly bigger, might prolong myDSV outward and change into the business commonplace everybody plugs into. Or it retains the platform closed, as a result of openness offers away the sting it presently offers DSV’s personal clients. There isn’t any proof but pointing both method. If DSV chooses the second path, the one higher aligned with its personal industrial curiosity, the coordination hole stays open exactly as a result of the occasion finest positioned to shut it has no purpose to.
A platform constructed to shut that hole creates actual, measurable worth for each individuals without delay: much less theft and a documented paper path for the finance chief, fewer supply disputes and automated invoicing for the operations chief. All it wants is a normal cell connection. The lacking piece was by no means the cell connection.
Good metering: the hole the roll-out didn’t shut
Eskom is 87% behind its personal goal for putting in good meters by 2027. Municipalities owed Eskom R98.5-billion in early 2025; that has since handed R110-billion, nonetheless rising regardless of the roll-out. Nationwide treasury’s response – a R2-billion programme putting in meters and routing fee straight to Eskom – reaches solely round 250 000 meters over three years, in opposition to a nationwide base of thousands and thousands of connections.
That response solves the fallacious downside. Individuals usually do pay their electrical energy payments. The failure occurs after that, someplace within the chain between assortment and Eskom.
Maluti-a-Phofung proves the purpose. In Might 2023 it signed an settlement handing billing to Eskom instantly. Fee ranges rose from 17-18% to 40% by October 2024, largely from written-off debt and curiosity, then fell again to 24-25% by March 2025 and stayed there. Eskom’s personal clarification: billing errors, fallacious time-of-day pricing and pay as you go distributors who collected cash and by no means handed it on. That’s not a defective meter; it’s a failure of how cash strikes by the system after assortment, no matter billing expertise sits beneath.
A platform-based resolution has to do two issues without delay. It has to get billing and reconciliation proper, closing the particular gaps Eskom named at Maluti-a-Phofung. And it has to settle instantly with Eskom reasonably than routing funds by municipal treasury, the place they don’t reliably arrive. The municipality retains the shopper relationship and its political standing, however not custody of the cash in transit. Maluti-a-Phofung’s personal settlement already routed billing to Eskom instantly, and it nonetheless fell again to 24-25%. Direct settlement alone was not sufficient; it needs to be paired with back-office accuracy, not substituted for it.
There’s already a authorized route for a personal firm to take this function: a municipal public-private partnership, ruled by its personal chapter of the Municipal Finance Administration Act. Midvaal is already part-way by procuring a 20-year electrical energy concession below this precise course of. However the route is legally actual and virtually empty: a 2025 authorized evaluation discovered only a few PPPs have ever been accomplished at municipal degree. Nationwide treasury streamlined the national-level PPP guidelines in February 2025. It left the older municipal-level guidelines untouched.
Eskom just isn’t a impartial bystander. It already occupies the precise function a personal platform would compete for, and is increasing it: it has singled out the 14 worst-indebted municipalities for its personal distribution company agreements (DAAs), with reporting suggesting that would develop to 30. Underneath the three DAAs already signed, buyer funds go straight into Eskom’s personal checking account, with Eskom deciding the order by which that cash will get utilized, leaving the municipality getting, in a single report’s phrases, “small change if something”. Eskom has a direct industrial purpose to maintain increasing its personal model of this function, not make method for a competitor.
The extra real looking opening runs by Eskom, not round it. Its personal DAA execution is demonstrably weak, so a personal platform’s extra believable buyer will not be a municipality looking for a PPP companion. It could be Eskom itself, shopping for within the accuracy its personal roll-out doesn’t ship, whereas holding the settlement relationship and the political credit score. The expertise already exists, contained in the banks, cell networks and fee processors that deal with much more quantity than South Africa’s 257 municipalities mixed. What’s lacking is the deal that connects that functionality to Eskom, not the aptitude itself.
The operator that can’t be designed out
The phrase “operator”, by this level, means one thing broader than a cell community: whoever holds the platform place. In each verticals examined right here, a model of that operator already exists, and neither is a telecoms firm. Eskom runs the closest factor to a metering platform. DSV runs the closest factor to a logistics verification platform. Neither is completed – Eskom’s model is badly executed, DSV’s doesn’t prolong previous its personal community – however the house isn’t empty. It’s occupied, imperfectly, by incumbents who acquired there first, and neither wanted to be a cell operator to get there.
That modifications the query. It isn’t whether or not the platform layer will get constructed. It’s whether or not the incumbent finishes the job, or whether or not the hole in its personal execution stays open lengthy sufficient for another person to get in. For metering, whoever closes that hole most plausibly sells accuracy to Eskom reasonably than making an attempt to switch it. For logistics, the result relies on a choice DSV hasn’t clearly made but. A brand new specialist with out an present foothold in both market has a narrower opening than the scale of the underlying downside suggests.
Less complicated options, constructed on infrastructure that already exists, are inclined to arrive earlier than the purpose-built various is prepared. BlackBerry discovered that lesson whereas it was nonetheless profitable. The specialist that survives would be the one which builds its platform earlier than a general-purpose resolution makes it pointless – and understands that the time it has to do this is shorter than it appears.
- The writer, Pambos Soteriades, has spent 28 years in cell telecommunications, together with govt roles at Vodacom Group and Telkom Kenya. He’s not affiliated with, employed by or invested in any operator, establishment or firm talked about on this article
- Subscribe to TechCentral’s every day e-newsletter
- Get breaking information alerts on WhatsApp
