By Bhanu Shekhar, Chief Digital Officer, GE Power in the Middle East and Africa

The smelters in the GCC consumed more than 63,000 GWh of electricity last year – that’s about how much Austria produces in a year. It’s also the amount of power the sector used to produce more than 5.2 million tons of aluminum.

That’s a huge amount of power demand at a time when the GCC aluminum industry is facing numerous challenges, including fluctuating oil price, changing regulations and an increasingly competitive global market.

For operators, this means an increasing focus on reducing costs, increasing efficiencies and driving productivity gains.

In looking at this, we talk at GE about the “power of 1%,” which reflects the insight that even small marginal improvements in efficiency, availability and productivity can have on the performance and the bottom line.

And it’s through powerful digital industrial software solutions that we seek to capture these efficiencies. That’s why we’ve developed Predix, the world’s first cloud-based operating system specifically designed for industry and industrial processes and systems.

We’ve looked at digital industrial-driven efficiency in the aluminum smelter industry and find that a 1% efficiency improvement could save the global industry US$ 970 million in production costs, increase output by US$ 936 million and save US$ 464 million in operations and maintenance costs.

In the GCC alone, we estimate that digitization could deliver US$50 million in savings, on operations and maintenance costs alone.

That’s why we see that digitization in the aluminum smelting sector is the big opportunity for the industry, and now is the time to adopt these solutions that can help operators right now to shift their cost curves and transform their processes.

During this week’s Arab International Aluminum Conference (ARABAL) I talked about digital opportunity and gave an example of how we are partnering with multiple  smelters around the world  to implement our digital smelter solutions.

Through our Asset Performance Management software and “digital twin” processes that help us develop deep insights into the current and future performance of the “twin” assets, we are focused on helping to reduce energy consumption and excess aluminum fluoride consumption across their operations.

We’re expecting to fundamentally transform their current operations and provide a real impact on the bottom line.

This week alone, I’ve seen great interest from many others at two events in which I’ve participated. First was ARABAL in Dubai, but also at the Kuwait Disruptive Innovation Conference & Exhibition.

This is a truly exciting way to leverage extremely powerful software to help companies in the aluminum sector and across industry more broadly to capture significant efficiency and operational gains that translate in to a range of benefits, from the environment to the bottom line.

Malawi’s debt situation is worrying after Ministry of Finance spokesperson Nations Msowoya confirmed that the country is owing foreign institutions $1.9 billion (about K1.31 trillion) while domestic borrowing is at K0.7 trillion.

The development is worrying as a significant amount of the budget and foreign currency is shipped out of Malawi to repay the foreign debts owed to multilateral and bilateral creditors when such resources should have been reinvested in the country while shoring up its balance of payment position.

Parliamentary Committee on Budget and Finance, Rhino Chiphiko, expressed concern especially about the Chinese and Indian loans because Malawi government was not transparent on how they were contracted.

“These loans were approved as a blanket by the then Parliament. They were in phases, but up to now government has not come in the open to say how much we have used and how much remains because I am sure interest rates must be very high,” said Chiphiko.

He urged government to slow down on contracting new loans to allow Parliament to scrutinise the current debt portfolio.

According to Chiphiko, some loans did not make sense, citing the borrowing from China to build the Presidential Villas and hotel in Lilongwe and wonder “what it is that Malawians are gaining from the Presidential Villas because at the end of the day it is Malawians, not the infrastructure, who are going to repay the loans through their taxes.”

Msowoya, however, defended the excessive borrowing as “normal”.

“We are not mortgaging the future of Malawians as some people are saying,” said Msowoya as quoted in the Daily Times of Wednesday November 30, 2016.

The flagship newspaper, The Daily Times has also criticised the excessive borrowing in an editorial comment titled ‘Government borrowing is killing this country.”

The paper agreed with at University of Malawi’s Chancellor College economics professor Ben Kalua that government’s borrowing would have made sense if it were meant to finance production.

“Unfortunately, for Malawians, the borrowing goes directly to bankroll consumption,” the paper noted.

It called the K2.1 trillion debts harmful to the nation against a background of K1.1 trillion national budgets which parliament approved.

The paper noted that commentators have expressed concern that government is mortgaging the future of this country through debt.

It urged the MPs to start taking government to task as to how it used the debts.

World Bank states that Malawi’s public debt has increased sharply over recent years with servicing costs now close to levels recorded prior to the 2006 debt relief.

Zimbabwe’s central bank isn’t endearing itself to anyone with this story on the front-page of the Herald newspaper. “Court cases won’t stop bond notes”, the headline says.

The notes have been issued using a statutory instrument under the Presidential Powers Act, Zimbabwe’s higher education minister Jonathan Moyo has confirmed.

That may mean the notes can only be used for six months, which isn’t what the authorities want. There have already been attempts to get the bond notes declared illegal, notably from ex-VP Joice Mujuru .

What the RBZ’s lawyer Gerald Mlotshwa is saying is that since the statutory instrument hasn’t been nullified “the central bank can proceed to issue out bond notes and coins today without any hindrance.” Not every Zimbabwean will take that lying down.

Shout-out to the citizen bankers

You’ve heard of citizen journalists and citizen scientists – but how about citizen bankers? Zimbabwean advocate Fadzayi Mahere coined this term on Twitter on Monday morning in response to the leaked photos of stacks of bond notes and bags of shiny new bond coins .

Could be a contestant for word-of-the-year, don’t you think? Here’s the definition: someone who works in the banking sector but is worried enough about the advent of bond notes to share the pics from his or her smartphone.

How they gonna fix a cash shortage like this?

OK, so last week the central bank told Zimbabweans that no-one would have more than 19 bond notes (which it says is worth $US19) in his or her purse at a time.

Now the central bank says that the maximum withdrawal of bond notes is 50 per day, 150 per week. That’s problematic on at least two fronts. First, 50 bond notes is a lot more than 19.

Also, do they mean you can only get 50 of any kind of currency out per day? There’s no confirmation of that yet, though large queues outside banks seen at 08:00 this morning would suggest Zimbabweans are rather hoping not.

Of course, if the bond notes start to lose value then it won’t take long for lots of them to be necessary to make up 19 “real” US. The rumour on the streets is that they’re already trading 1:3.

Confidence “down the tubes”

Former finance minister Tendai Biti says on Twitter that the “unanimous’ opinion of local economists is “no to bond notes”.

Professor Steve Hanke from Johns Hopkins University in the US isn’t Zimbabwean but he is an expert on Zimbabwean inflation (the hyper-kind).

His latest assessment: “Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe uses billboards to assure public that new bond notes are 1:1 w/ USD. This is nonsense, confidence is down the tubes.”

He also thinks the government wants to “hoard” the US dollars. Said one Zimbabwean (and his feelings were echoed by others): “I think they want to sweep off all the USD from the streets.”

#Prayforthecopywriter

Spare a thought for the copywriter at Askeland Media . The agency has had to insert a grovelling apology into the press today after Zimbabweans turned on the central bank over its badly-spelt “bond note billboards.”

Many felt the mis-spelling of “seperate” only made the bank look amateur and even less worthy of trust than it already is.

Askeland has apologised for the “embarrassing” mistakes and said they “sincerely regret any harm this might have caused to the reputation of the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe.” Their reputation’s already not great, guys.