OLD Mutual Group, a diversified firm, says for business to survive it should be agile, resilient, and innovative and rapidly adapt to the global environment characterised by volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity (Vuca).
Speaking at the Top Companies Survey awards ceremony for 2022 in Harare on Thursday night, Old Mutual Group chief executive Samuel Matsekete said firms should move with the times.
The awards were sponsored by his company in partnership with the country’s number one business newspaper, The Financial Gazette.
“This year’s theme ‘Innovating for growth in a Volatile, Uncertain, Complex and Ambiguous environment,’ is apt. The theme speaks to a need for all companies to increase focus on resilience and agility at the same time,” Matsekete said.
“We are all exposed to Vuca, variously. All the paradigms we see shifting demand interventions that ensure that as businesses we become more agile and resilient at the same time. This has meant adapting the way we do business, supply chains, and how businesses access and interact with customers. Strategies, people, processes, and technologies must not only continuously adapt to changing conditions, but do so faster each time.”
He said at Old Mutual it remained the firm’s commitment to continue making a positive difference in society as they adapt forward.
“As we adapt the business, we continue to adhere to a responsible business framework. In addition to continuing to evolve our customer value proposition, we remain conscious of the wider community whose development we are committed to support,” Matsekete added.
His firm has invested in special interest sectors like green energy and also continues to support value chains in mining and logistics through real estate developments and has opened at least two sites over the past 12 months.
“Some of our real estate developments are also designed to support SMEs as they seek to grow and formalise their ventures. East Gate Market (in Harare) is a model that has proven to be successful.
“Our innovation hub in Harare continues to see overly exciting ideas being incubated and transformed into real business ventures. Only this quarter four ventures were officially launched into the market at the hub.
“Our flagship financial literacy programme, ‘On the Money’ has touched many people from organisations spanning across the spectrum of private, public, large, and small and medium size entities. There are very encouraging testimonies of how people from urban and rural areas continue to benefit from this programme,” Matsekete explained.
He said Old Mutual Group remained committed to contributing to the development of business and the Zimbabwean economy.
Zimbabwe Stock Exchange (ZSE)-listed beverage maker, Delta Corporation, was crowned the best performing company on the local bourse for last year.
Mobile network operator Econet Wireless and Simbisa Brands were named the first and second runners-up respectively.
“Delta comes out supreme in the 2022 Top Company survey following a similarly rigorous exercise of quantitative and qualitative evaluation factors. Whilst Delta may not have come out tops in each of the evaluation factors, it did score consistently high in both the qualitative and quantitative factors in this years’ survey of deserving Top Companies.
“The complexities of the Zimbabwean environment when it comes to assessing the financial performance of listed companies made the task equally more cumbersome in this year’s edition of the Top Company Survey,” Top Companies Survey 2022 judges’ chairperson Simbiso Musa said.
Delta also won the Disclosure and Investor Relations Award after scoring a fair balance in the transparency of its financial statements.
