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Wednesday, September 9, 2009.

From Creamer Media in Johannesburg, I'm Shannon O'Donnell.

Making headlines today:

By the end of August, State-owned freight transport group Transnet had raised some 63% of its funding requirement for the 2009/10 financial year.

Acting CEO Chris Wells indicated that the funding requirement remained at 12,9-billion-rand for the current year, during which period it expected to spend nearly 22-billion-rand on capital projects. The balance of the capital would arise from operating cash flows and income from investing activities.

The group was pushing ahead with an 80,5-billion-rand, five-year investment programme, despite some adjustments to the project pipeline in light of the slowdown in the economy.

The funding gap would moderate to 9,4-billion-rand in 2010/11, when the group planned to invest 19,4-billion-rand on expansionary and stay-in-business projects. The utility operates South Africa's railways, harbours and fuel pipelines, and will spend more than half of the capital on expansionary projects.

Zimbabwe is in talks with six foreign companies over buying its shares in the country's sole iron and steel works, where it expects steel output to reach one-million tons a year.

The Zimbabwe Iron and Steel Company, Ziscosteel, stopped operations last year at the height of an economic crisis, plagued by a lack of capital to re-quip its plants.

The government holds about 70% in Ziscosteel and had previously not been keen to sell its shareholding.
However, the country's new coalition government, sees the sell-off of State entities as part of necessary economic reforms.

Minister of State Enterprises and Parastatals, Gabuza Joel Gabbuza, said six foreign steel producers had been identified by the government to bid for the shareholding, and had all completed due diligence on Ziscosteel.
A final bidder could be chosen by the end of this month.

Also making headlines:

State freight logistics utility Transnet takes a fresh swipe at South Africa's economic regulators.
The Green Paper on National Strategic Planning and a policy paper on Performance Monitoring and Evaluation is tabled in Parliament.
The World Bank says that the global crisis couldn't have come at a worse time for Africa.
And, a study will be conducted into the potential wind power problem for South African air traffic radars.

That's a round up of news making headlines today. For more on these and other stories please visit engineeringnews.co.za.