Ghost Stories #105: Altron – a multi-platform, multi-decade moat

yeah absolutely no company is an island but you do have a very large boat so it does seem to be quite an encouraging story right now so i think let's dig into more elements then of what we saw yesterday and just where the business is at the moment it's something quite interesting obviously i look at everything across the market and the jc remains a market where i think the more traditional sectors like mining and retail they get a lot of attention We just don't have that tech culture that you'll see on the NASDAQ and those sort of places.

And yet we use technology every single day in just about every single thing that we do.

One of the more powerful messages that you delivered during that Capital Markets Day was the extent to which Ultron's services are so ingrained in our daily lives.

I found that very interesting.

It's these platform businesses that you speak of, right? We actually see and touch them all the time.

We just don't realize it.

So perhaps you could give the listeners just an overview of the Ultron group.

Very high level.

People can obviously go read that for themselves.

And then perhaps more importantly, those real world examples of how we actually use your products every day in South Africa.

That's probably one of the things I like the most about Ultron and one of the things that really excited me most about the opportunity when I first joined the group.

At corporate level, at a high level, we've got what we call platform and IT services businesses.

Our platform business is Nedstock, a well-known consumer brand in solar and vehicle recovery and in telematics.

Our fintech business and our health tech business and our IT services businesses are Alton Document Solutions, which is a managed print business.

It's the Xerox partner for South Africa and a couple of other African countries.

Alton Digital Business, which is a systems integration business and Alton Security.

And then we have a joint venture with a global company called Alton Arrow, which is an electronic subcomponent business.

That's the corporate side of it.

I think the cool side of it, where a lot of South Africans probably don't know that you engage with Alton on a daily basis and kind of how we enable things.

And I think maybe let me give you four practical examples.

The most practical one of it, you probably carry your smart ID card around with you.

There's about 27 million smart ID cards in South Africa in issue.

printed by and your biometric data is securely encrypted on that card by Altom.

So that's the first one.

If you go to a private practitioner, you or your family go to a doctor, there's about a 45% chance that your physician would run our private practice management system.