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SIMON BROWN: I’m chatting now with Lucio Trentini, the CEO of Seifsa, the Steel and Engineering Industries Federation of Southern Africa. Lucio, I appreciate the early morning time. In a release that was sent out the number that absolutely jumped out at me was this is a sector that employs approximately 170 000 employees. In hindsight it makes sense. There are so many other sectors you’re feeding into. I’m thinking automotive, I’m thinking mining. It is a very large employer in our economy.
LUCIO TRENTINI: Yes. Good morning, Simon. Absolutely. This is a R900 billion sector, the metals and engineering industry. We contribute about 2.6% to the country’s GDP and about 13% to the country’s overall GDP. There are over 10 000 companies in our sector. You mentioned the number in terms of employees in the sector – it’s a little more than that. Not given the tough couple of last couple of years that we’ve had, there are about 300 000 employees in our sector, [with] about 200 000 blue-collar workers.
Bear in mind that the sector spans from the north to the south and the east to the west. So it’s an enormous sector, and it’s a sector that can play quite a critical role in getting the economy’s flywheel turning.
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We are going to be meeting with the president and his team on Tuesday to take the president up on the invitation that he gave at the investment conference, to work with government to address some of the challenges that we face as a country and as a sector.
We want to sit down and work out a plan of action with clear milestones and deliverables and see what we can do as a sector. As you said earlier on, we are smack in the middle of this economy. We are both a customer and a supplier to major sectors around us like mining, construction automotive, auto assemblers, etc.
So the metals and engineering sector is a huge sector and, quite frankly, if this sector does well the economy benefits from it – and vice versa. When we go through tough times we bring the economy down with us.
SIMON BROWN: I’m thinking it is really. For a moment I thought the one space which maybe you aren’t involved in is retail, but no, because distribution centres undoubtedly have steel engineers, and of course that tin of baked beans is aluminium. I mean that was designed – maybe not every tin – at some point.
You’re meeting with the president tomorrow. What is the key message to the president? I imagine there are a lot of challenges in this sector. The big one as we stand here right now is Stage 6 load shedding.
LUCIO TRENTINI: Yes. A lot of time was spent by the president at the investment conference last week addressing the number one crisis facing this country at the moment. That is energy and the whole link between energy and whether or not this economy will be able to move forward or not.
There are a number of other issues like the state of our infrastructure at the moment, and crime and corruption. But at the end of the day we’ve taken the president up on his invitation to work with government and the government has acknowledged that [with] the challenges they are faced with they can’t do it alone. And we want to play a part. Collaboration and partnership are now the key words in trying to put together a plan of action against a clear plan.
The investment conference was interesting in the sense that I think everyone came to the conclusion that in order to have an inclusive economy we need a stable democracy. And for a stable democracy we need an economy that at least is growing slightly above the current levels that we find ourselves [in]. There’s no secret that for the rest of this year we are going to be ticking along just above recession.
So it’s tough times for business. Business finds itself in a particularly difficult spot. But at the end of the day we have to be optimistic. We cannot afford to fall back on being negative. No one’s going to fix the problems that we are faced with for us; we need to do it ourselves, and business by no means wants to sit on its hands and do nothing. We have a lot invested in this country. A lot of the pledges that were made at the investment conference last week were made by companies in our sector. We have a lot to lose, and at the same time we have a lot to gain if we can get just a few things right.
SIMON BROWN: It is that ‘lot to gain’. And it is a sector which stretches back as far as the developed economy it has been in this country. To your point, it touches every single little bit. It’s almost in a sense the heartbeat of the economy. If we think around the steel and engineering industries, you are going to almost give us the best sense of how an economy is doing. If an economy is doing well – or we’ll put it the other way – if your members are doing well we are going to have an economy doing well.
LUCIO TRENTINI: Absolutely. This economy represents small, medium, and large multinational corporates. We are the backbone of the economy. And, as you’ve said correctly, when the metals and engineering industry does well we bring everyone along with us, and vice versa. We simply cannot afford to sit back and do nothing.
We are not really expecting government to fix our problems for us. We want to play our part and we think we have an important role to play. At the end of the day we are taking the government up on their invitation and we are going to start a process. We are not expecting miracles tomorrow, but what we are expecting is an open-door policy, a willingness on the part of government to work with business. We have enormous expertise and experience and knowledge on how to fix things. That’s what engineers do. We identify problems and we fix them, and we want to share that experience, that expertise, with government and play a part. At the end of the day we only have one South Africa. No one’s going to give us another South Africa to work in.
We are not walking away from this problem. We are going to dive in and do our bit.
SIMON BROWN: We’ll leave it there. That’s Lucio Trentini, CEO of the Steel and Engineering Industries Federation of Southern Africa. All the best for your meeting tomorrow. I appreciate the early time this morning.
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