SIMON BROWN: I’m chatting with Anthony Clark. You’ll find him on Twitter and Small Talk Daily. Of course the president on Monday evening gave lots of talk around power generation. Frankly, the story sounds great. The execution is what’s going to matter.Ramaphosa’s energy interventions get the nod from industry heavyweights
Ellies shares over a decade I think the interesting thing with Ellies, as you correctly say, is it’s always repositioning itself to try and take advantage of a very difficult environment. They’ve gone through DStv, they went for corporate lighting. At one point they were making a lot of money from generators, and they’ve now flipped once again to do sort of what I would call home automation, home-streaming systems and of course, as you correctly mentioned, alternative energy and solar.
Now, if they had to suddenly raise money to try and expand into a new area of alternative energy, solar power or any of the new technologies – which we know consumers in this country will want, to negate Eskom’s problems – where are they going to find the money from to actually roll up this initiative? They can’t raise money via an equity placement because the share price has bombed out. Standard Bank has been propping them up for years. The current interest rate is Jibar plus 4.5%.
SIMON BROWN: Yes. I take your point on that. Reunert obviously has the cable division. I’ve chatted with them before. But then Sabcap with Chris Seabrooke, recently took out ARB, and ARB is an obvious winner here. Sabcap is a stock that I know that you are a fan of. But phase two will be materially larger. Then they’ll be generating or producing 800 tonnes of gas a day and five tonnes of helium. Given that that site is on one of the largest known gas deposits in the world, it has potential to expand.