Pinnacle Africa is expanding its business within the SADC region with immediate effect, launching a new business division under the Pinnacle Africa umbrella to facilitate growth north of the border.
This will exclude existing businesses in Namibia and Botswana, with the short-term goal being an established hub operating from Pinnacle Africa’s headquarters in Midrand and trading across the border in US dollars.
The hub in Midrand will service and build the company’s capacity to sell ICT products in surrounding African countries. This hub will begin servicing Zimbabwe, Zambia, Mozambique, Angola and Malawi immediately with the long-term view being expansion into east Africa, headquartered in Mombasa and servicing the horn of Africa.
The SADC business division will be headed up by industry veteran Vic Brits who arrives with extensive ICT experience in the Africa continent. Brits has a good understanding of Africa business, having lived in Lagos for two years while setting up a subsidiary for HP.
His experience of managing multimillion dollar business units has lead him to focus on achieving business results by applying a collaborative approach, utilising all the resources available in an innovative, driven, and pragmatic fashion. He leads teams based on entrepreneurial fundamentals and coaching and exercises goal-specific oriented sales behaviour while developing solid long-term relationships with his customers.
Brits has worked across all sectors within the IT industry over the last 25 years – from channel partner to locally owned distribution and international OEM (hardware and software) distributor for many of South Africa’s leading IT companies – and is renowned for having developed and maintained longstanding relationships within the African IT channel and industry.
“With business as usual with no major structural changes, the SADC region will conservatively maintain an economic growth rate of between 5% and 8% per year over the next 10 years,” says Brits. “We are focusing on developing new markets for our wide range of products close to the heart of our operational hub in South Africa.”
He emphasises that the growing middle class in most of the fast growing countries in the SADC region are stimulating the economies in these countries and fuelling the demand for a wide range of IT and communication equipment.
New infrastructure development by our neighbouring countries and large governmental projects in oil, gas and electricity generation will drive demand for proven systems and data centre solutions.
Brits will report directly to regional MD Tim Humphreys-Davies.