By Mike Chambers, Senior Partner, EMA Partners South Africa

EMA Partners South Africa is one of the most recent additions to our international family, and is currently the only EMA Partners firm on the African continent.

Our head office is in Johannesburg , South Africa’s business hub and commercial link into the rest of Africa.  An office in Durban , the country’s main port on the Indian Ocean , serves clients across the coastal region.

Our consultants are all highly-trained, and have many years of local and international senior management experience gained in a variety of business sectors

We have a substantial and growing corporate client base that operates in almost every sector of the local economy, including financial services, mining and minerals, FMCG , IT/telecoms , packaging, transport, healthcare, hospitality and leisure.

The majority of our revenues come from companies operating within South Africa, but we have successfully undertaken assignments for clients in neighbouring territories, and across the sub-Saharan region.

Emerging from a turbulent political past, South Africa held its first democratic elections in 1994.  The negotiated, and ultimately peaceful, transition to democracy was unique in world history. The release of Nelson Mandela from prison, and his subsequent inauguration as President, heralded the birth of the new South Africa    - the “Rainbow Nation”, as it has become known.

Free from its apartheid past, South Africa in recent years has been capitalizing successfully on its new-found acceptability within the global community, and today is actively building a robust, export-driven economy.

The racial divisions within South African society prior to 1994 created far-reaching economic and social problems that will take many years to solve.

The government is committed to redressing the imbalances of the past as quickly as possible, and to involving fully the previously disadvantaged population groups in all sectors of the economy .  Substantial investments have been made in upgrading the country’s educational system, and  comprehensive transformation legislation is now in place.

The inequalities of the past, and the recent transformation initiatives, have created many challenges for companies operating in South Africa, and have produced some interesting new dynamics in executive search.
Many clients today are seeking to change the racial composition of their senior management teams in order to comply with the new legislation.

A shortage of suitably-qualified and experienced Black talent has quickly emerged in many sectors. Significant numbers of older, white executives are being squeezed out of the system.

Top talent is available, but is often in short supply. As a result, good candidates are becoming more and more mobile, and are expecting increasingly substantial packages. In order to maintain their competitiveness, many large companies are looking towards the international market as a source of senior managerial talent.

Trends such as these are significantly changing the fabric of South African business, the structure of the labour market, and the nature of client requirements.

These developments have required us to acquire an additional, and increasingly valuable portfolio of executive search skills.  Today, our consulting team is very knowledgeable in the workings of this challenging new environment, and the firm is consequently well-placed to be able to assist both local and international companies with their senior management resourcing needs in South Africa.