Savant has produced four reports highlighting a number of sub-sectors within the information communication technology electronics (ICTE) sub-sectors in the South African economy as investment and information resources for the members of the Savant initiative.
The reports focus on the consulting; embedded software; process control, measurement and instrumentation (PCMI) and radio frequency identification (RFID) sectors.
Yusuf Timol, Director: Electrotechnical at the DTI's Trade and Investment South Africa (Tisa), says South Africa is one of the more sophisticated and promising emerging markets in the world today and has the most advanced economy on the African continent.
"It has a population of over 47.9 million (mid-2007), 63% of which ranks between 15 and 64 years of age with a median age under 24 years. This places the vast majority of the population in the available workforce - a massive potential," he says.
Consulting:
On the consulting front, the current generation of South African consultants has gone through baptism by fire, through involvement in the initial expansion of infrastructure in South Africa. These consultants are now using their extensive experience in other parts of Africa, where such development is currently taking place.
Timol says a good mix of technical and general consulting skills allows South African consultants to manage an entire project from a holistic perspective - to manage clients (funding recipients) and their expectations, oversee the work of contractors and manage project finances. These are skills seldom found among consultancies based in more developed regions of the world, who tend to be narrowly focused specialists.
Sectors in which consultants are most active include:
* Agriculture;
* Education;
* Energy and mining;
* Financial and tax services;
* Health and social services;
* Industry and trade;
* Information and communication;
* Public administration;
* Transportation; and
* Water, sanitation and flood protection.
Embedded software:
Timol says the South African embedded software industry is actually an industry cutting across various other industries. Because the integration between the embedded software and the other technologies, many companies have in-house embedded software capabilities to be able to develop their own software.
"Another reason for keeping embedded software skills in-house is the protection of IP. In many cases the embedded software forms the core of the product functionality and without it the product would be almost if not completely useless," he says.
Local tertiary education produces engineers and other technical personnel with excellent embedded software skills, Timol adds. These skills are broad based and useful in many industries.
Substantial embedded software development, including conceptual and design work, is also done by contract development houses that will also handle the rest of the product design, including mechanical and electronic hardware and sensors.
"This makes sense because the best products are developed through an intimate marriage of embedded software and other technologies and this makes best use of South African engineering teams' innovative and integrative abilities," he says.
PCMI:
The South African process control, measurement and instrumentation (PCMI) sector continues to be an early adopter of modern business solutions and was among the first in the world to implement modern measurement, SCADA (supervisory, control and data acquisition) and MES (manufacturing execution systems).
Timol says the local PCMI sector is comparable to most developed economies, consisting of hundreds of local PCMI companies with specialities in process control manufacturing technologies, data acquisition and remote control, test, measurement and calibration, computers and software, miscellaneous hardware and services and systems.
These companies service the process industries, manufacturing and services sectors.
"The outlook for the industry has remained bullish for the last decade with steady growth in sales of 4% to 7% annually, which is in line with ARC Advisory Group's prediction of a trend of about 5% growth worldwide," he says.
RFID:
The South African radio frequency identification (RFID) market certainly holds promise of further growth through innovation and expansion. Although the African continent as a whole lags behind developed markets in some instances, South Africa is at the forefront of innovation and pioneering of the RFID technology, Timol says.
RFID is an automatic identification method which relies on storing and remotely retrieving data with the use of RFID tags. A tag is typically incorporated into or attached to a product, an animal or even a person for the purposes of identifying that entity using radio waves. Two types of tags exist - active and passive. Passive RFID tags have no internal power supply while active tags have an internal power source.
The launch of the EPCglobal standard, promoting one standard that all tags, readers and middleware, including architecture, should comply with, creates a perfect model for growth for a mass market deployment of the technology across different markets in Africa.
"South African RFID innovators are leading the way in the continent's growth and development of wireless products and services, offering international investors the best that Africa has to offer in this market segment," Timol says.
If you would like to receive these reports or find out more about South African companies in these various sectors, contact Nadia Nortje at info@savant.co.za.
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