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Europe-based global major aerospace group Airbus has released updated guidance for its expected performance for the rest of this year. Its previous guidance for the year had been issued in late April. The new guidance downscaled the group’s expected performance for this year, both in financial and delivery terms. This was because of issues with certain of the group’s space programmes, and challenges in the supply chain for its commercial airline business.

The ‘second wave’ of government’s Operation Vulindlela initiative is poised to be widened to include additional structural reforms to those that have been pursued to date in electricity, freight logistics, telecoms, water and skills with the goal of stimulating higher levels of economic growth over the coming five years. Established jointly by the Presidency and the National Treasury in October 2020 to accelerate priority structural reforms to overcome problems identified as “binding constraints” to economic performance, Operation Vulindlela is expected to continue as a flagship programme under the government of national unity.

Thelo Group’s management plans to buy Deutsche Bahn’s 49% shareholding and is in talks with financiers to raise $250-million to help the South African company transform into a developer of rail lines and ports in sub-Saharan Africa. The capital will be used “to expand our capacity quite aggressively,” fund “project preparation on some of the projects that we’ve already secured” and inject equity into them, Thelo’s chairperson Ronnie Ntuli said in an interview, adding that the company may ultimately seek to list on a stock exchange. Talks are being held with African financiers, including development finance institutions, as well as international investors over both debt and equity investment, he said.

New Oppenheimer research grant awarded to physicist, to develop medical technology

Published: 25 Jun 24

The Oppenheimer Memorial Trust has announced that the first winner of its New Frontiers Research Award is University of Cape Town (UCT) physicist, Dr James Keaveney. The trust created the award to help reinvigorate research excellence in South Africa (in 2021/22 the country spent only 0.62% of its GDP on research and development; in comparison, for example, in 2022 Türkiye spent 1.32%, Australia 1.66%, Portugal 1.7%, China 2.43%, Taiwan 3.96%, and South Korea 5.21%). The award has a value of R7.5-million, which will be disbursed over five years. Keaveney is a particle physicist who has spent his career studying the fundamental particles and forces that make up all the matter in the universe. He has done so working with the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (better known as CERN) and its Large Hadron Collider, leading international research teams. While there he developed AI algorithms, and leading-edge detectors.

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