Description

The focus of this research is to understand the key areas of IT spend within the mining sector in South Africa with the objective of highlighting key areas of opportunities for the IT Service providers. The objective is to provide an overview of South Africa’s Macro- environment and its impact on the mining industry, provide insights into the Mining sector‘s value chain and the adoption of ICT services across value-chain participants, provide global and domestic challenges facing the mining sector, highlight the Mining ICT spend in 2016 and offer future forecast insight, and to identify Growth Opportunities within the mining sector for the IT and telecom service providers.

The market for the service providers is very competitive, especially as service providers are offering similar IT solutions and services to enterprises. Differentiation through innovative pricing models and industry knowledge will be a key factor. In order for service providers to remain competitive and differentiate themselves they need to increase industry expertise, build dedicated and industry-focussed teams that are able to cross-sell, offer innovative branding and price strategies such as pay-per-use models, change their approach from selling service to providing full ICT solutions, that is, to have a more business focus, and to develop contracts with flexible SLAs. Furthermore, enterprises are looking for more flexible contracts that enable to accommodate change in their IT strategy as well change in the overall technology landscape. In doing so, enterprises are of the opinion that they will have better control on the cost and able to implement innovate IT services as needed.

The Three predictions for the Mining Sector in South Africa are as follows:
• ICT spend in the mining sector was ZAR 4.7 billion in 2016. It is expected to grow at a CAGR of 2.0% and reach ZAR 11.8 billion in 2019. The
plan of action that will shape IT strategy in the mining sector is moving toward managed services, customized system integration, and the
consolidation of data centres. The key objective is to move to cloud-based services as a means of reducing operational IT cost and footprint.
• Deficient infrastructure and services, legacy systems and the shortage of skilled resources and services providers are some of the restraints
delaying the adoption of innovative IT services and solutions.
• Service providers need to increase industry expertise, build dedicated industry-focussed teams that can cross-sell, offer innovative branding
and price strategies, bring about a change in their approach from selling services to providing full ICT solutions, and offer flexible contracts.