Denis Opudo
According to Bongumusa Kunene, an entrepreneur from South Africa, they launched Kevali Chemicals, a multinational company with the aim of inspiring the youths. Kunene is the CEO and co-founder of the Kevali Chemicals founded in 2014, and the blacks have its full ownership. Furthermore, Kunene has more than three decades of experience in the industry. He said that he partnered with his entrepreneurial friends with adequate knowledge in the chemical industry to start the company. Their main aim was to inspire the young black generation to realize that there are many opportunities in the field of science.
Kunene and his colleagues are all involved in the daily running of the company. Kevali Chemicals Company has its offices and clients across SA. It is also operational in the bordering countries such as Tanzania, Namibia, Swaziland, Zimbabwe, and Croatia. According to Kunene, he and his colleagues are very passionate about what they are doing. They have all been in the industry for a long period. He added that there was a lack of black professionals who were rising or joining the industry. That is why they saw the need to create a platform for the black professionals to develop and improve their skills and prepare them to take over the industry from the older generation.
With its headquarters at Sandton, Kevali Chemicals is running its operations and supplying chemicals to a wide range of industries. The industries include public water, metal, and steel, mining, pharmaceutical, petrochemicals, automotive, poultry and dairy, food and beverages among others. He added that they aim to become a diversified chemical firm. He said that they do not want to players in every field and successful in none of them. He added that him and his colleagues they are much focused on how they put their portfolio in place and their capabilities. According to Kunene, they began with sectors where their strength in technical skills and application technologies mostly lied on. They later on slowly developed their confidence and their reputation as well. Once that was achieved they moved to the next step, and that has been the core of their quick success in the industry.
Kunene admits that they are not yet at their point of satisfaction and they are still overcoming the challenges. According to him, their aim is to ensure that people see a company that is under the ownership of blacks succeeding and working at the top of South African as well as global industry. Kunene is also a holder of BSc honors degree from the University of KwaZulu-Natal (UKZN) and a diploma in business management from the same university. Apart from that, he has a diploma in brewing from the Guild of Brewing in London. Kunene said that the qualifications that he possesses are more about the knowledge that he gets. The important part is how do people apply what they learned into an opportunity of business and face each day, each new event as an opportunity of learning a new thing. He said that their success had been made possible by their clients who gave them a chance and their family and staff. They have also received support from Industrial Development Corporation (IDC) in partnership with the Department of Trade and Industry’s (dti) Black Industrialists Incentive Program. He added that the dti assisted them to work on their vision and he admits that they could take longer to work on their vision without dti. He said that their workers had an option of working with a bigger company, but they opted to remain with Kevali Chemicals Company. He thanked their workers for their loyalty and commitment to the company.
