Fortune favours the ambitious
It’s unusual to give a company a pat on the back when its headline EPS have just done a tidy impression of a particularly self-destructive lemming. But Life Healthcare has taken a short-term hit in the interest of setting up a decidedly ambitious future.
Readers of the national tea leaves may be wailing, however, as the company has decided that if it is to spread its wings it needs to reduce its dependence on the local market and peddle its wares in pastures greener.
The plan is to shift from being an SA-focused acute-care group into an international diversified health-care provider. And to hurry the process along, it has chucked a perky R14.3bn at the acquisition of Alliance Medical, one of Western Europe’s leading providers of complex molecular and diagnostic imaging services. It has strong market positions in the UK, Italy and Ireland, and has a platform to expand its offering in 10 more European markets.
There are numerous structural reasons why this is an attractive market. Ageing populations and advances in health care can put extraordinary pressure on cumbersome public health systems, which are increasingly becoming unaffordable. Modern diagnostics are astonishingly powerful tools, allowing doctors to detect a range of diseases at a stage when they are still potentially treatable, rather than having to stick on the sombre face and suggest that the patient might like to get cracking on the bucket list.
This can be lifesaving for the patient, as well as cost saving for the health service — and it’s a great market to be in.
Connected and infected
There are so many obvious threats to global peace, harmony and one’s ability to sit in the sun sipping a refreshing sauvignon blanc without being bothered by external forces that it can be easy to forget the biggest threat of all, lurking in the dark corners of the interwebs.
There’s a short-tempered, incomprehensible braggart in the White House, a loon loosing off missiles from the comfort of Pyongyang, a sinister strongman in the Kremlin and heaven knows what is kicking off in the politburo standing committee in Beijing.
But as the Internet of Things starts to connect everything from your defence force to your health service, and your home to your car, the sure knowledge that everything that’s connected can be infected shows how vulnerable we are to cyber terrorism, cyber warfare and cyber crime.
The old image of an acne-ridden pizza addict sitting alone in a darkened room breaking into networks for a laugh is way out of date, and the advent of state-sponsored hacking organisations with access to resources raises the stakes exponentially.
The WannaCry cyber attack looks to have been a money-making scheme rather than anything more sinister, but the fact that it employed Eternal Blue, a tool developed by the US National Security Agency and leaked by a hacking group called the Shadow Brokers, which may be linked to the Russian government, shows the sort of forces involved. WannaCry is believed to have hit more than 45,000 organisations in 99 countries, causing enormous disruption to the National Health Service in the UK. It demonstrates how vulnerable we are.