As it marks 60 years since its founding, South African electronics giant Altron is looking forward to the next 60 with a fresh focus.
Born during the rapid industrialisation boom of the 1960s, Altron has successfully reinvented itself several times in the decades since to remain relevant in the rapidly changing South African economy.
Today, the group has pivoted to focus on its platform and services businesses.
Speaking at the company’s 60th birthday celebrations, CEO Werner Kapp explains that the group aims to leverage its wealth of data, together with analytics and artificial intelligence (AI) to provide business intelligence that will help customers be more competitive.
Anonymised data from the group’s Mediswitch, which processes around 50% of the country’s healthtech transactions, and NetStar, which tracks a big proportion of the country’s vehicles, could form the basis of this analytics offering.
Collin Govender, group chief operating officer of Altron, tells IT-Online that the group is broadly defined by three platform businesses: healthtech, fintech/retail and telematics.
In healthtech, Altron offers the Mediswitch platform, along with solutions in practice management and electronic health records, a medical bureau, occupational health and practice management solutions and value-added services including healthcare insights.
Altron’s fintech solutions are for lending services and microfinance businesses.
Under this platform, NuPay and Delter offer integrated payments and collection solutions from cash disbursement with NuCash to authenticated debit order solutions with DebiCheck.
In terms of retail solutions, Altron offers integrated technology solutions catering to retailers’ specific needs. These solutions range from networks and digital infrastructure to workforce management, POS systems and AI strategies.
On the telematics platform, Netstar boasts 1,7-million customers served. It links to a 24/7 emergency call centre and has helped to recover more than 90% of stolen vehicles.
Netstar has expanded its operations to Malaysia and Australia, says Govender.
The digital services business offers services across multiple industry areas, including data and AI, networks and data centres, security, enterprise applications, managed services and cloud solutions.
Altron’s distribution company Arrow is one of South Africa’s oldest distributors, and still a force to be reckoned with, Govender adds. It has also pivoted with changing times, and now also offers col-location warehousing facilities for customers along with its traditional warehousing and distribution operations.