Despite a slow start to the year where we only won our first New Facility order in May, we ended off the year by making our Forecasted Turnover and exceeding our EBIT, which was an exceptional result, especially when one considers the overall depressed South African economic climate and all the additional challenges and disruptions of load shedding and in some cases, having no water, brings for businesses.
New Technologies
With the COVID-19 pandemic that swept the world from around December 2019, causing the South African Government to impose a variety of hard lockdowns starting on the 27th March 2020, it has been said ”that we have created new technologies in 2 years, what it would normally have taken 10 years”.
SKIDATA South Africa were no exception to this, with the introduction of new technologies in 2020 such as “Touchless” with our “Wave” to obtain a Parking Ticket, plus our “Ticketless” License Plate Recognition (LPR) solution for access and egress to parking garages, and of course our “Cashless” Tap & Go and Chip & Pin devices installed on the Automatic Payment Machines that accepts Credit & Debit Card payment, plus our “Scan to Pay” via a Mobile Smart Phone. We are delighting our commercial property owners and landlords with solutions that meets the current Health & Safety requirements and assisting them in their quest to increase cashless transactions as a percentage of overall revenue generation.
Further, we are introducing Parking Technology Solutions that are “cloud” based, whereby the control of the onsite solution will be virtual in the cloud. The platform is known as sweb®, which offers a variety of products such as sweb® Control, sweb® Analyze, sweb® Validate and sweb® Mobile Pay, wrapped in a Software Platform known as Solution Subscription, whereby the client pays a monthly subscription fee for these software licenses.
We were able to win a variety of New Facilities in 2022 due to our direct and indirect sales approach, in the provinces of Gauteng, Western Cape, and in KZN with the award for the iconic Oceans Mall Umhlanga project.
This took our active SKIDATA installed portfolio to 110 sites in South Africa, and 25 in Sub-Sahara Africa.
Oceans Umhlanga
The Mall, valued at R1 billion, forms part of the R4,3 billion mixed-use Oceans development in Umhlanga, KZN, and comprises a hotel and three towers with luxury apartments. The entire project was designed by Elphick Proome Architecture and funded by the businessman and founder of the Edison Group, Vivian Reddy.
The Parking Technology requirement was for a solution that offered the latest access & egress technologies with a focus on cashless payment.
There are a total of 8 Entry Lanes & 6 Exit Lanes for now, with additional lanes being discussed in the future.
Plus, there are also a total of 14 Automatic Payment Machines distributed around Oceans Mall.
Casual Parkers can pay with cash and cashless at 4 Multi-Payment (Cash & Cashless) Machines and cashless at 10 (Cashless Only) Machines, fitted with devices for Credit & Debit cards, which allows for the revenue to be deposited directly into the landlord’s bank account.
As this reduces the cash management, the Parking Management Operator, Karabo Parking, with whom SKIDATA partnered with on this project, manages and controls the entire car park with only 4 staff.
SKIDATA implemented the very latest technology of Solution Subscription, which is a software platform for the entire Parking Technology Solution that includes the Operating System and various sweb® solutions of Mobile Pay, Validate (Desktop) and PlateTech for License Plate Recognition (LPR), plus Windows Licenses that are all upgradeable as and when needed for an upfront Fixed Monthly Fee, with a new Server every 5 years.