First experiences with doing business development in Africa

Hello again, my faithful followers, readers, friends, business partners and all others. I must admit that our 1st week`s party for this blog has been fantastic last night and I am still recovering my strengths from it. But don`t worry, my NAI maschine functionning (explained in my post no 6 "Hot stuff" from june 23) was not effected negatively and we can thus proceed now with the full normal speed and quality (?) of my today`s post. 

Today I wanted to show You in a very quick and fast ride, how I made my initial experience in doing business in Africa and how I`m feeling about this. In one of my earlier posts I already explained to You, that 5 years ago my colleague Arno Ett (Sales Director VDT Latam @ Vulkan do Brasil) and I had started to follow the historical example of the brazilian bandeirantes (a mixture of explorers and adventurers, which discovered the deep interior of the state of Sao Paulo about two centuries ago from out of the at that time few cities close to the beaches) and spread our sales activities out of our factory and company Vulkan do Brasil in beautiful Itatiba in the interior of the state of Sao Paulo to the huge and distant latin american region and countries, means Mexico, Central America, Caribbean and (mainly) the south american, especially in the andes region, countries. I will come back to this exciting and highly successful project later-on in future posts. 

But what happened is, that our Vulkan Group HQ in Herne, Germany, due to the impressive success of this project, exactly a year and a half ago invited me, to help our industrial division during it`s massive global expansion project, to give a special focus on our introduction into the mining (and other industrial) markets in Australia and allover Africa. Therefore we immediately founded our "Vulkan Southern Hemisphere" (Australia, Brazil and Africa) initiative and started lots of activities. About the business development which we initiated in Australia, I will report to You in future posts seperately, because Australia, besides beeing a huge continent, has it`s own particularities with regards to people, culture, business and industry. 

In the case of Africa, my activities, together with - over the time - my wonderful brazilian team colleagues Elisangela Santos (Marketing & Sales Director Vulkan Couplings division) Marco, Santos (HR & Special Projects Director), Josias Leal (Development & Engineering Director, "Mr. Brake"), Tiago Bedani (Sales Director Vulkan Drive Tech Brazil division) and several of their employees, all excelent specialists with tremendous experience in industrial engineering and sales, started at the beginning of december 2018 with my arrival, together with two very close brazilian collaborators at Johannesburg and Cape Town. In fact, at the beginning of our "african adventures" we presented ourselfes to Robert and Michael Lowin (Managing Director resp. General Manager) of our South African sister company Vulkan South Africa, who manage beside the sales activities in South Africa also our fantastic engineering, distribution and service center in Edenvale, Johannesburg. 

That`s how we got started. We spent almost the first 6 months on analisis and the joint definition and realisation of several development and improvement projects in Southern Africa. During the intire last year, we started to get familiar with many other african countries and market regions, we participated several important public industrial events (future posts will follow) and made countless valuable contacts, gained numerous new friends, partners and customers allover the different countries, which  we visited, amongst others Zimbabwe, Mozambique, Botswana, Sambia, DR Congo, Ghana and Guinea. Maybe You think, that were only a few of the in total 54 countries allover the beautiful african continent. But believe me, if You count with 1-2 weeks visit time for each of our travels to these countries, in some cases we even did repeated visits, and compare this to the 52 weeks of last year, You might get an idea, of what I am talking about. And You may not ignore the fact, that all my highly esteemed colleagues and comrades - the same like I - did all this additionally to our normal, main responsabilities and duties in Brazil and Latin America, where our "home business" continued under our full responsability. 

But we really enjoyed it and made a real hell of all kinds of new experiences (good raw material for me for several future posts). And we clearly, together with our South African "blood brothers", overachieved all originally set goals. I will come back to more details of all of this in posts during the next months. I promise You, You will be very impressed and might even learn a lot from our experiences. But today I am a little later than normally - due to last nights "1st week party" of my blog and daily posts - and I need to finish this soon. But under no circumstances I will leave You without recommending to You a truthfully spoken very very interesting and eye opening book about the history of the african continent since it`s independence. This book is called "The state of Africa", was written by the author Martin Meredith and became published by Simon & Schuster for the first time in 2005. I bought it during one of my countless stop overs during last year at Johannesburg`s "OR Tambo International Airport" and "ate" it from the lecture of the first page on until I finished. If You want to understand the cultural background and the history of today`s african countries, this is a "must" for You (but just to make this clear for everybody: Simon & Schuster - at least so far - doesn`t pay me comission for my "propaganda" for this book). 

To understand something about Africa without listening to it`s wonderful music, is absolutely impossible. Therefore here my today`s music recommendation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wIGU11nopN0

This is the song "Hona" from the late Malian singer and multi-instrumentalist Ali Farka Touré (1936 - 2006), whose speciality were blends of traditional Malian music and it`s derivates. And for sure, my today`s picture for this post cannot be but about Africa, a huge continent and it`s incredibly amicable and hearty  population, which I still hardly know, but already passionately love. If You think, damned Covid-19 had stopped us from continuing our business development projects in Africa during the last months, You have totally failed. But I will explain this during future posts, as we have come now to the end of my today`s post. See You - hopefully ! - here again tomorrow. Enjoy the just started (Sao Paulo) brandnew beautiful day and have lots of fun and success.