There was a fair amount of rank shuffling in the support services sector this year. The sector includes a range of companies involved in education, business training and employment companies as well as environmental waste management.
The overall winner of Top Empowerment Companies (TEC), Adcorp, clearly headed the sector rankings, while smaller companies improved their scores significantly from last year.
Second-placed Mvelaphanda Group moved up from fifth position last year. Mvela's total BEE score of 61,52 was helped by the group's facilitation of a further and broader BEE transaction.
New entrant Kelly Group did well to muscle into third place with a BEE rating of 57,56 - coming just ahead of waste management company Enviroserv. Having listed on the JSE in 2007, Kelly is 52% owned by Brait Private Equity, while BEE investor Safika, headed by BEE heavyweights Vuli Cuba, Saki Macozoma and Moss Ngoasheng, has a 28% stake. The remaining 20% is held by management. Kelly is in a unique position in that it creates employment for about 25 000 temporary workers on its database, yet this isn't included in its BEE scorecard. The group scored full marks for its enterprise development programme, which helps small employment agencies get off the ground.
One of the poorer performers was international services, trading and distribution company Bidvest. The group slipped down from second to sixth place. Still, last year the group refinanced the Dinatla consortium's empowerment investment, which cemented its partnership with Dinatla's core shareholders for another five years. Within months of the Bidvest-Dinatla transaction, seven historically disadvantaged individuals had become commercial directors of various divisions, four Dinatla directors had been appointed to the main Bidvest board and Cyril Ramaphosa had been named nonexecutive chairman of the group.
Waste management firm Enviroserv has so far managed to get away without doing a major empowerment deal. It is 12,22% black owned - most black shareholders are individuals and there is no dominant black shareholder. It slipped to fourth position from third last year in the sector ranking, scoring an overall 57,40.
