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Octotel CEO Trevor van Zyl joins the TechCentral Show to talk about where South Africa’s fibre market goes next – including a potential merger with MetroFibre Networx. Van Zyl told TechCentral that Octotel and MetroFibre Networx are assessing a combination that would create the country’s third-largest fibre network operator, with both companies sitting under a common investor in an AIIM-led consortium.

In the interview, he sets out Octotel’s position: just under 400 000 homes passed across the Cape Town metropole, the West Coast and the Garden Route; a balance sheet he says lets the company deploy capital when and where it chooses; and a Western Cape footprint he argues overlaps very little with MetroFibre’s.

He discusses the next phase of roll-out, too. As networks push into lower-LSM areas, “the commercials and the economics start changing”, he says, and affordability now reaches well into the middle class.

He rejects the idea that fixed-wireless access can substitute for fibre in dense settlements – wireless has improved dramatically, he says, “but when you look at the actual demand case and what is required in those environments, it absolutely has to be fibre”. The more important question, in his view, is how to distribute it economically once you get there.

On Openserve’s move into the ISP business, Van Zyl is relaxed. He says he understands why Openserve did it, but that Octotel will not follow: “We certainly don’t want to become an ISP. We’re not good at being an ISP.”

He also expects consolidation among ISPs as networks saturate, sees low-Earth orbit satellite as complementary to fibre rather than a threat to it, and will not rule Octotel out of any future move by MTN on fibre network assets.

Don’t miss the discussion. TechCentral

Chris Shortt, chief technology officer at Shoprite Group, says the work of the next five years is meeting the customer at their point of need, wherever that is – and that this does not mean the end of the store.

Speaking on TechCentral’s Meet the CIO podcast series, brought to you by NTT DATA, Shortt said Africa’s largest retailer is building towards a unified experience regardless of how a customer reaches it: ordering by voice from a home assistant, or walking in to choose their own tomatoes and their own fillet.

“How do we blend that for you so that it’s actually how you want to do things, as opposed to how we might want you to do things,” he said. The group’s store footprint, he added, is as alive and active as it has always been, and its point of presence in communities still makes a difference to customers.

Delivering on that promise rests on a real-time inventory layer, which is why modernising Shoprite’s core SAP retail platform is the largest technology project the group has running.

Shortt also discusses:

• How the CIO/CTO’s job has changed, with the infrastructure now simply expected to work and the role shifting towards helping business counterparts understand the art of the possible;

• Why about 12 000 Shoprite employees are using generative AI, and how the gateway the group built picks the least expensive model that can handle a request;

• Why his product teams now pair one or two people with several agents, and what he put to the group’s chief people officer about recruits who arrive with agents of their own;

• Why he will not comment on other retailers’ ERP failures, and the “day in the life of” testing he relies on instead;

• What he tells the audit and risk committee when they ask what keeps him up at night; and

• The book that shaped his thinking, and the productivity habit he will not work without.

Don’t miss a great discussion on the future of retail. TechCentral

The company runs 125 chargers and wants a thousand within five years, focused on urban hubs.

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Rubicon’s public charging network is profitable and grew usage markedly in two months as fuel prices spiked, the company’s e-mobility head has told TechCentral’s Watts & Wheels.

Hilton Musk said usage climbed roughly 30% in a single month, then another 30% the month after. “We thought it was a fluke,” he said. “But it carried on.” Growth started levelling off in June, largely because importers have sold through their stock of affordable EVs.

Rubicon, founded in Port Elizabeth in 1985 as an electrical supplier to the likes of Volkswagen, now runs 125 chargers and wants a thousand within five years – about eight times its current footprint.

The network turned profitable roughly a year ago, which Musk put down to concentrating on dense urban markets: Cape Town, Johannesburg, Pretoria, Durban and Bloemfontein. Around 90% of driving happens inside those hubs, he said, with the other 10% between them.

The company has chargers on the N3 and N4 and opened the Durban-Cape Town route in 2024. The N1 remains GridCars territory.

Musk expects public charging to take a larger share in South Africa than the 80/20 home-to-public split seen in mature markets – closer to 70/30 – because many EV owners live in complexes and estates with no charging.

At R7/kWh, Rubicon’s DC charging works out to roughly R1/km, against about 50c/km on municipal power at home. Both undercut petrol comfortably.

He is sticking with 2028 as the year battery-electric vehicles reach 5% of new passenger sales. Count hybrids and plug-ins, he said, and the market is nearly there already.

Don’t miss the discussion. TechCentral

South Africa has still not crossed 1% of new vehicle sales going to electric vehicles, well short of the 5% mark at which adoption typically accelerates, The Electric Mission executive director Hiten Parmar told TechCentral’s Watts & Wheels with Wills.

Parmar, who heads the non-profit advocacy body and co-founded the Southern African Electric Mobility Association, said the past three years have changed what is available locally. Battery-electric models are now selling below R400 000 and range has improved sharply. But 64% of cars sold in South Africa go for under R400 000, and import duties plus the ad valorem levy keep most electric models above that line.

The commercial side is moving faster. Light-, medium-, heavy- and ultra-heavy-duty electric trucks are now available in South Africa rather than being promised in presentations, Parmar said, with fleets reporting total cost of ownership savings of up to 25%. The economics improve the further a vehicle travels, which makes high-mileage fleets the first adopters rather than the last.

He pointed to the 12.5GW of private solar installed in South Africa by the end of 2025, on figures from the South African Photovoltaic Industry Association, as an underused base for charging. Fleets can charge from their own generation during the day and fall back to the grid overnight.

On manufacturing, Parmar said six of the seven passenger and light commercial vehicle manufacturers in South Africa now have batteries entering local production, and four have secured hybrid investments. What is missing is a tier-one battery cell supplier and an incentive framework for zero-emission vehicles to sit alongside the one government has run for local vehicle assembly since 1995.

With European export markets tightening towards 2035, he said, the window for that decision is closing.

Don’t miss the discussion! TechCentral

Winstone Jordaan was building charging infrastructure before South Africa had electric cars to plug into it. GridCars began developing its backend platform in 2010. The first EVs arrived in 2013.

In this episode of Watts & Wheels with Wills, the GridCars founder tells William Kelly why the hardware was never the hard part. Working out where to put a charger and how much power to feed it is straightforward. Building the billing and roaming systems behind it is not.

That is also the answer to a question drivers keep asking: why can’t you just tap a card? Because the network needs to know who you are. If a charger is faulty, or the power is about to go off, Jordaan wants to be able to call you.

He is candid in the interview about the economics of building a national EV charging network. A charge point operator needs around a thousand chargers to be profitable, by calculation. South Africa has roughly 650 in total. A 24-hour call centre alone takes seven people. Long term, he expects 500 000 chargers for a car parc of 11 million vehicles.

Jordaan also thinks adoption is about to accelerate sharply, and that the disruption will reach well beyond motoring. He recently told one industry gathering that a third of the room would be out of business within five years.

On charging infrastructure as a reason not to buy an EV, he is clear about one thing: there are enough chargers. Thinking otherwise, he says, is just being poorly informed.

Don’t miss the discussion. TechCentral