Shell, BNP Paribas Among Firms Exiting South Africa
Jen Why is this happening? Why are all these big companies deciding to pull out of Africa, and specifically South Africa in this case? Yeah. I mean, I think it depends which companies that you’re actually taking a look at. If we take a look at the one specifically that we heard from in the past few days, Shell, as you mentioned also BNP Paribas was a pretty significant blows in terms of South African exits. And we’re seeing a number of these companies really being played into the elections that are coming up in a few weeks, in particular with Shell. The company has about 600 petrol stations here. So we’re hearing the opposition party using this potentially as a blow to the ruling party. That you know, potentially they are part of the reason why we’re seeing these corporate exits. But I think the important thing when we take a look at the MP, Paribas, Shell, we’ve also heard Barclays and Standard Chartered have been scaling back across the continent. A lot of these have been in the works for quite a while and they’re not just happening across the African continent, but we’re also hearing a lot of these big corporates are exiting some of these smaller markets just globally rethinking their strategies. But we also did hear from Microsoft. Which announced that it was one of many multinational firms in Nigeria that was planning its exit. And and that is specifically because of the challenges that we’ve seen in Nigeria. And we’ve seen a lot of corporates exiting that economy in particular. So Jimana, it’s it’s a multi faceted. Picture depending on where you’re looking at. But I think the important thing to note is that this isn’t necessarily a direct reflection of a lot of these African economies and the challenging situations that they’re in now. In many cases, it is just a rethinking of strategies for a lot of these corporations.