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ARCHIVE : Roadspan launch function - 24 April 2008
Posted on 9 May 2008

Welcome and thank you for taking the time out of your busy schedules to join us this evening.  We appreciate you are all busy and are extremely grateful for your interest in and support of Roadspan. I have to say it has been an interesting and somewhat unusual road by which we arrived.  I guess it started in October of 2007 at which time we looked at buying Blacktop.  However, after 3 weeks of intensive work, in spite of the fact that we thought there was huge market potential, we reluctantly decided not to pursue that acquisition.

Then on Monday 11th Feb 2008, 10 weeks or to be exact,  73 days ago, I got a call from Gert Koen and his team to ask if I would be interested in backing a new initiative in road surfacing and rehabilitation. In those last 10 short weeks, we wrote a business plan, financed the new business, employed several hundred staff, found and refurbished this premises and have largely acquired a fleet for the 7 teams.  All 7 teams have been effectively deployed for several weeks. To put it mildly, I have never been involved in anything that has happened quite as quickly as this has.

Tonight is something of a celebration of a new and exciting initiative….I am not going to talk about building roads,   mainly because I don’t know anything about building roads!!  For that we have an outstanding team.  Gert Koen seems to be something of an icon when it comes to road surfacing.  In a past life, when I ran Avroy Shlain cosmetics, Avroy used to say to me that when 4 people tell you that you are drunk, go to sleep.  I don’t think there is anybody who has been in this industry for more than 5 minutes who hasn’t extolled the virtues of Gert Koen!

Over the last 10 weeks, Dieter Wetsch and Johann Saayman have similarly shown their capabilities.  Amongst our 7 foremen we have a collective 133 years of experience (or an average of 19 years per foreman).  In Graham Thorpe, we have one of the most respected workshop managers in the industry.  As you will have seen on your way in, we are about halfway through the process of acquiring a state of the art fleet of equipment.  And, I am delighted to say, that in the next few weeks, we will be announcing the addition of more than one other leading player who have decided to join Roadspan.

From a shareholding point of view, I am delighted to welcome Peter Vogel, and Daniel Ross of Coronation Capital and Eric, Sidney, Dionne and Kevin Ellerine from the Ellerine Brothers.  From Amrite Group, I’d like to welcome my partner, Geoff Green.  I think the reputations of the shareholders are well known, with a combined balance sheet showing over R15bio of net assets.  

The investment strategy of the all the shareholders is to invest in long term opportunities that have substantial growth potential.  In addition, all the shareholders place an unusually high emphasis on the quality of management.  So far, we have committed to an amount of R55m to finance Roadspan. 

Our intention is very simple - to make Roadspan a leading player in the roads surfacing and rehabilitation sector.  As soon as we have settled the road surfacing business down, we will also be looking for vertical integration opportunities to secure our supply chain.

For those of you that made yourselves available to help us evaluate the industry, we are hugely grateful.  And to all of you, we would thank you for your warm reception and welcoming attitude.  We understand that this is a tough sector but we are tremendously excited about the potential.

James Whitehouse
Chairman