https://afktravel.com/2960/top-15-castles-in-africa/
Tuesday, June 28, 2016
Why Naspers Lost 288,000 Digital Satellite Television Subscribers
http://afkinsider.com/128692/naspers-lost-288000-dstv-subscribers-in-sub-saharan-africa/?utm_source=AFKInsider+Newsletter&utm_campaign=f534895951-AFKInsider_Newsletter_28_6_166_28_2016&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_0aff70cb26-f534895951-132949841
Seven Of The World's Ten Cheapest Cities For Expats Are In Africa
http://afkinsider.com/128473/of-the-worlds-10-cheapest-cities-for-expats-7-are-in-africa/?utm_source=AFKInsider+Newsletter&utm_campaign=f534895951-AFKInsider_Newsletter_28_6_166_28_2016&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_0aff70cb26-f534895951-132949841
Africa's Giant Insurance Market Is Waking Up
Special Report: The Future of Insurance
Africa’s insurance market a ‘giant waking up’
A growing middle class and big infrastructure projects offer promise for insurers
When KPMG, the advisory company, held its inaugural East Africa Insurance Conference in February, organisers were surprised that more than 100 industry participants attended. James Norman, KPMG’s regional insurance head, was equally enthused when a similar number attended the launch of a report on the sector last week.
“There’s a real buzz about the sector because opportunities are immense,” he says. “There’s a young population, a growing middle class — most with smartphones — and an increasingly large diaspora coming back,” he says. “There’s a whole new generation of savvy consumers with disposable incomes and large infrastructure projects being built.”
Lukas Mueller, head of north and sub-Saharan Africa at reinsurer Swiss Re, is also bullish on the region, describing it as a “giant waking up”. He says the opportunities are many and varied — from infrastructure and agriculture to catering for the growing middle class.
“The insurance market is closely linked to economic growth,” he says. “When incomes rise you have more insurable assets.” However, he also describes the sub-Saharan African insurance market as a “diverse picture”.
South Africa accounts for almost 80 per cent of all premiums in sub-Saharan Africa and the country has an insurance penetration rate — the total value of insurance premiums as a proportion of GDP — of about 13 per cent, well above the developed world average. Of the rest, Kenya is among the most advanced, with a penetration rate of 3 per cent. Nigerias, in comparison, is about 0.3 per cent, even though it is Africa’s largest economy.
This diversity mirrors the continent’s broader economy. Commodity exporters, such as Nigeria and Angola, are struggling to achieve meaningful growth, while those nations with more diversified and less commodity-dependent economies — such as Ivory Coast, Tanzania and Kenya — are doing much better.
Delphine Maidou, chief executive of insurer Allianz’s global corporate and speciality Africa arm, says insurers should focus on the markets “that are getting the biggest foreign direct investment projects” but that the so-called “laggards” should not be neglected. “You’ve got to stick with them while diversifying your portfolio because eventually the cycle will come back,” she says.
Allianz is following her advice. Last October it opened a division in Kenya, its 12th sub-Saharan Africa operation. It comes a year after Prudential, the London-based insurer also started operations in east Africa’s largest economy, although that was through the purchase of a local player, Shield Assurance. In December 2013 Prudential bought Express Life Insurance in Ghana to enter that market.
Other deals include South Africa’s MMI Holdings buying two-thirds of Kenya’s Cannon Assurance last year, which then merged with Metropolitan Life Kenya.
Muammar Ismaily, a Nairobi-based insurance analyst at Exotix Frontier Research, expects there to be much more consolidation, particularly in east Africa. “There are dozens of players, but only a handful control the majority of the market,” he says. “And with new capital adequacy rules coming in Kenya in 2018, many companies are going to have to merge or be taken over if they want to survive.”
The new rules in Kenya, which come into effect in 2018, are part of what analysts say is a growing trend of improving regulation, albeit from a low base and with a need for firmer enforcement.
There’s a trust deficit gap — people don’t buy insurance because they don’t trust the providers. Claims are not paid quickly, fairly or correctly. It’s a huge pain point across the continent
One example of this need for tougher enforcement is the extent of fraud in the market. KPMG’s Mr Norman estimates premiums in sub-Saharan Africa would, on average, be 20 per cent lower if it were not for fraud.
Part of the reason for the fraud, he believes, is insurance companies’ failure to innovate in controlling costs, keeping tabs on their agents and, most importantly, getting to know their customers.
“There’s a trust deficit gap — people don’t buy insurance because they don’t trust the providers,” Mr Norman says. “They don’t think the promise [that a claim will be paid] is going to be delivered. Claims are not paid quickly, fairly or correctly. It’s a huge pain point across the continent.”
There are some signs of innovation. Nigeria, for example, is starting to see the first price comparison sites, such as Topcheck. Meanwhile, Ms Maidou says Allianz is seeing high demand for its recently created cyber insurance products. Another innovation, she suggests, is greater use of technology — for example, using satellites to assess agricultural claims — which is expected to become increasingly important for the industry as large scale commercial agriculture takes off. “Do you need to go to a field in a country where you don’t have an office when a satellite can do the job for you?” she asks.
However, it is at the other end of the market, in microinsurance, where the greatest innovation and disruption is emerging. Katerina Kyrili, head of African business development at Bima, which distributes and manages microinsurance payments in 25 developing countries, says insurance is not just for the relatively wealthy. She says this is indicated by Bima’s 23m customers, 40 per cent of whom are in sub-Saharan Africa and 60 per cent living on less than $2.50 a day.
Offering life insurance for premiums as low as $0.50 a month — for a potential payout of $4,500 — Ms Kyrili says Bima provides products that are easy to understand, such as offering cash for medical bills rather than blanket payments.
“Our view is the solution is all about product design,” she says. “It’s not just about affordability but an experience that’s accessible, simple enough to communicate and won’t create confusion but create incentives.”
Thursday, June 23, 2016
Investors Combine To Create Pan-African Energy Group
Investors combine to create pan-African energy group
Infrastructure backers will pool assets to launch company with power to supply 30m people
Infrastructure investors have launched a $3.3bn joint venture to create one of the biggest pan-African energy companies, as the private sector increasingly looks beyond individual projects to tackle the continent’s power shortages.
The Africa Finance Corporation, a Lagos-based development institution, and an infrastructure fund run by South Africa’s Harith General Partners will pool assets including a Kenyan wind farm and a Ghanaian thermal power plant in the venture, they said on Wednesday.
The partnership underlines increasing efforts by private investors to combine portfolios of African plants and grids across several countries, both to make them more financially flexible and in response to the scale of the region’s power deficit as cities and populations expand.
Africa below the Sahara — including South Africa’s industrialised economy, with the lion’s share of the region’s installed electricity capacity at about 48,000 megawatts — generates less power than Spain.
The 30 countries with the least power have an average capacity of 200 megawatts each.
The merged company’s more than 1,500 megawatts of capacity either installed or under construction, supplying about 30m people, would make it the continent’s seventh biggest electricity generator if it was a country.
The aim of the joint venture is to create “an African power company with its own balance sheet and its own assets,” able to attract faster financing than normal, Andrew Alli, chief executive of the AFC, said.
“For the last few decades the private sector has approached the problem on a project by project basis,” Mr Alli said.
“But when you fund on a project-finance basis, it gets very complicated,” with several lenders and providers of equity involved in each deal, he added.
Project financing for a big power plant can take up to two or three years to arrange, whereas the merged company could seek to raise money for new assets within months by tapping bond markets.
Tshepo Mahloele, Harith’s chief executive, said that the long-term horizon involved in building some assets also “does not fit well with a pure private equity fund model” where investors typically seek to exit in a few years.
Combining assets into a common vehicle would also make them “more resilient against disruption” with utilities increasingly focused on sending small amounts of power to individual consumers, Mr Mahloele added.
The merged company’s portfolio would include the Lake Turkana wind farm in Kenya, owned by Harith’s fund, and Cenpower, an AFC-backed owner of the Kpone thermal project in Ghana. A third of the assets are renewable.
“An African-owned, African-located, and African-operated company would also add value to the continent”, including by helping to develop a cadre of people with expertise in power infrastructure, Mr Alli said.
Tuesday, June 21, 2016
How Much Do You Know About Cape Town?
https://afktravel.com/106835/quiz-much-really-know-cape-town/?utm_source=AFKTravel+Site+Widget&utm_campaign=2e4b0ecfde-Awe_Inspiring_Volcanoes_Cape_Town_Quiz_6_21_2016&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_3335458183-2e4b0ecfde-142372501
How Not To Get Mugged In Johannesburg
https://afktravel.com/65407/how-not-to-get-mugged-in-johannesburg/?utm_source=AFKTravel+Site+Widget&utm_campaign=2e4b0ecfde-Awe_Inspiring_Volcanoes_Cape_Town_Quiz_6_21_2016&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_3335458183-2e4b0ecfde-142372501
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