Excluding last year's few deals with smaller players, the health-care sector's ownership by black investors remains largely unchanged. Some foreign firms will sell only if forced to.
AltX firms, including Myriad, chaired by Maki Mandela, sealed BEE deals which took their holding in black hands above the 25% threshold envisaged by the never-ending health charter.
While established players bettered their BEE overall standing, sectoral rankings in this survey remain the same as last year's. For instance, Remgro subsidiary Medi-Clinic is again the industry's least empowered, with Enaleni leading the pack for the second year in a row.
The generics firm is again followed by peer Aspen and third is Africa's premier hospital group, Netcare. A few improvements assisted Medi-Clinic reclaim its place in the Top 100 after a disappointing show in last year's survey.
Though its overall score rebounded to 23,71% from a dismal 8,2% last year (2005: 22,76%), Medi-Clinic's employment equity score somewhat weakened to less than a percent.
The hospital group is one of six listed firms that attracted labour minister Membathisi Mdladlana's controversial attack last year. He blasted them - including Comair and Prism - as well as 1 200-plus unlisted firms - for defying transformation and employment equity.
That said, health entities of all sizes will predictably focus on improving their standing on the employment equity front. But that doesn't mean everyone is fully behind broad-based BEE. Some will use scarcity of black talent as an excuse but do nothing to bridge the skills gap.
But, with the long-awaited BEE Codes of Good Practice finally in place, the next few years should see the industry promoting the other pillars of empowerment without further snags. Like their hi-tech peers, foreign health-care players not able to sell are likely to opt for equity equivalents involving other areas of broad-based BEE.
These include corporate social investment, and skills & enterprise development that will in turn lead to increased access, accelerated growth and more business. Increasing access in townships and rural areas is a distant prospect: it will take years before the public health enhancement fund g ets off the ground. Indecision rules.
On the upside, the sector is ready for the next phase of broad-based empowerment.
The wave of courting black buyers is slowing down, given the flurry of BEE transactions closed in 2005. These huge deals worth billions involved such heavyweights as Afrox Healthcare (renamed Life after delisting), Netcare, Medi-Clinic and Discovery, which is spending R100m to train 300 black medical specialists in 10 years.
Despite a sizeable black shareholder base (following the R1,1bn sale of a stake to Mamphele Ramphele's group and others, 15 months ago), Medi-Clinic's executive is an exclusively "pale males" club. FirstRand-held Discovery has a similar make-up. At Netcare, black people in top positions are also in short supply.
Priorities are skills development, access, workplace transformation and an end to what World Medical Association president Dr Kgosi Letlape terms apartheid health-care.
