ICT is becoming the centre of gravity at Reunert
Anthonie de Beer has been group CEO of Reunert for five months, and he has already outlawed an excuse. “Don’t come and speak to me about the market or…
The Full Story
Anthonie de Beer has been group CEO of Reunert for five months, and he has already outlawed an excuse.
“Don’t come and speak to me about the market or inflation or things are tough and the copper price and all that,” he told TechCentral at iqbusiness’s Geshidocon conference at Kyalami on Wednesday. “What are you doing about capturing this proportionate amount of the opportunity set in a supercycle?”
De Beer, who took over from Alan Dickson in March, has described the group, founded all the way back in 1888, as sitting inside three long-running structural booms at once.
“I very quickly realised in studying this business that we operate in three supercycles: energy transition, technology — AI is the acceleration — and defence,” he said. “A company that operates in three supercycles is very fortunate, but the question is not where you operate; it’s what you are going to do about it.”
It is interesting messaging for a group that has just had a rough financial half-year. In the six months to 31 March 2026, group operating profit fell 23% to R453-million and headline earnings per share dropped 22% to 185c, while the interim dividend was held flat at 90c.
Almost all of the damage came from electrical engineering, where operating profit fell 40% to R138-million on revenue of R3.5-billion, a margin of 3.9%. The segment accounts for 55% of Reunert’s revenue but under a quarter of the combined operating profit of its three reporting segments.
The comparison that hangs over Reunert is long-running rival Altron, which has restructured aggressively around technology platforms and in May surprised the market with a special dividend of nearly R500-million. Does Reunert regret not pivoting as hard? “No, I think we are pivoting harder,” De Beer said.
His argument is that Reunert’s ICT businesses have never been made to work as a single system. There is Reunert Connect for connectivity, iqbusiness for digital acceleration and consulting, a national dealer channel he says reaches 25 000 businesses, and Quince Capital, the group’s rental and asset finance arm.
Read: Reunert’s iqbusiness sets sights on tech consolidation
“Historically, we haven’t connected the dots between them all,” he said. The funding leg is what makes the rest work, he argued: a company that needs to spend R500 000 upgrading its data stack can have Quince assess and fund it. “That’s the secret sauce in actually helping unlock that.”
ICT is already carrying the group. Revenue fell 4% to R1.86-billion but operating profit rose 1% to R321-million, lifting the margin from 16.4% to 17.2%. On 29% of group revenue, it delivered more than half of the three segments’ combined operating profit before central costs.
Reunert’s ICT growth ambitions run largely through iqbusiness, in which the group agreed to buy a 74.2% stake in March 2023 and which Rob Godlonton was named to lead in November, replacing Adam Craker after 15 years. In May, Godlonton told TechCentral the market was entering a signi…