SA companies have come to the party when it comes to buying goods and services from black-owned or -run businesses.
The top three - stockbroker Barnard Jacobs Mellet, computer assembler Mustek and payment solutions group Compu-Clearing Outsourcing - all received maximum points for procurement. They are ranked in accordance with their overall black economic empowerment ranking, says Steven Hawes, a researcher at Empowerdex.
Hawes is pleased with the way SA companies have embraced affirmative procurement. "It's one of the biggest successes in terms of broad-based black economic empowerment," he says. "These companies have done well."
Hawes says the improvement can be seen in there being only 2,5 percentage points separating the top 10 companies.
The improvement can also be seen in the performance of the top-ranked company. Last year it was security company Command Holdings that led the way by spending 70% of its procurement on BEE companies but it is way behind the 96,8% of Barnard Jacobs Mellet for this year's leaders.
The improved performance allays the fear Empowerdex expressed last year that though there was support for affirmative procurement in corporate boardrooms, there was also concern that this commitment was not filtering down to the rest of their businesses.
Unsurprisingly, companies in the ICT and financial services sectors that have embraced transformation dominate the procurement listing. Enaleni Pharmaceuticals is the only non-ICT or financial services company in the top 10.
Like the previous year's listing, there was a shake-up in the companies coming into and falling out of the top 10. The procurement list does have one surprise: the absence of fixed-line operator Telkom. Hawes says the improved performance by other companies is one reason Telkom was pushed out of the top 10. The more stringent reporting criteria on procurement also hampered its rating.
The latest edition of the department of trade & industry's codes of good practice on empowerment emphasises support for small- to medium-sized, black-owned businesses and those owned by women. Hawes says Empowerdex decided not to include these latest measurements so as to be more fair to companies like Telkom that do take empowerment seriously but did not give a more detailed picture of theirs.
Hawes concedes there are limits to how Empowerdex measures the effectiveness of procurement. He says the listing does not measure the economic effect of how this spend on black companies filters through the economy, or quantify the scale of a compan y's spend.
He says a company like Telkom might not be in the top 10 of the procurement listing but because it has a large procurement budget it makes a larger contribution to empowerment than some of the companies that made the listing. "It does not tell the story of value creation," he says.
