South Africa is currently experiencing its longest stretch of continuous electricity provision in two years. While the lack of load shedding is encouraging, Eskom still faces challenges within its legacy coal fleet and higher demand over the winter months, which means that load shedding may not be behind us entirely. Either way, the performance of Transnet and Eskom remains critical to South Africa’s economy, its listed companies, and the bond market.
Given this importance, we have put together a dashboard of eight high-frequency metrics to objectively track operational performance at these utilities and present the latest update below.
While performance across all metrics remains below 2019 levels, both Eskom and Transnet have shown improvements from their worst performance of last year and a good trajectory over the past month.
Performance dashboard:
Source: Bloomberg, Mergence
Source: Eskom, Transnet, IMF Portwatch, Bloomberg, Mergence Calculations
Source: Bloomberg
Source: Transnet
Source: Transnet, Eskom
Source: Eskom
Transnet metrics:
- Weekly SA Iron Ore Exports
- Weekly SA Coal Exports
- Monthly Transnet Port Total Cargo Handled
- Monthly Transnet Port Total Containers Handled
- Monthly Transnet Port Total Vessels arriving
Eskom metrics:
- Weekly Eskom Energy Availability Factor
- Weekly Eskom Unplanned Outages (MW)
- Daily Average load shedding level.
For the weekly and monthly data series, we have taken a monthly moving average to smooth short-term noise. For each of these indicators, we have normalised them to set 2019 as a base line and adjusted them by their historic volatility. We have then averaged these to get an index of Transnet and Eskom performance.
The intuition is that a 0 on this index will represent getting back to 2019-level performance, and a number of -2 will mean that performance is 2 standard deviations below the 2019-level.
While these improvements are encouraging, there is still a way to go for both utilities. But if this improvement can be sustained, we could see some positive impact on national GDP.
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