On Monday we went to Yaoundé to meet with a private equity firm here in Cameroon named CenaInvest. We also recently spoke with Business Partners (a South African PE firm), EMPEA, as well as the head of the investment promotional council. All the meetings went well, but some things here still remind us how different Cameroonian business practices are. The head of the investment promotional council told us that we would have to be patient because “time is not money in Cameroon.”
That said, I think we were all very excited to see the businesses themselves. I have to say that for the most part, I’m very impressed. So far we have been to see: a brick and roofing tile factory; a concrete manufacturer (incidentally owned by Andre, who is one of our hosts here), and a factory that makes foam for mattresses and chairs. The facilities themselves are quite impressive, often with relatively new equipment (on average 30-40 years-old, but with some very new 1-5 years-old equipment), though normally the automation is kept minimal (as you would expect). There’s also a lot less safety precautions than the US (which you would also expect, but for some reason I didn’t think it would be to this degree). Lastly, most companies seem very operations focused, which makes sense considering that many companies here have difficulty following through on their business plans.
Normally, the most challenging aspect of these businesses for us is their books. They are quite hard to decipher because not only are they in French, but the translations don’t often make sense (i.e. stocks is actually inventory, materials is equipment, etc). Just to make things interesting, the accounting rules here are significantly different, so we have to recalculate what we are looking for. All of this said, these are small problems that just require some effort from our group to fix. We are all still confident that we will make a significant impact while we are here.
That said, I think we were all very excited to see the businesses themselves. I have to say that for the most part, I’m very impressed. So far we have been to see: a brick and roofing tile factory; a concrete manufacturer (incidentally owned by Andre, who is one of our hosts here), and a factory that makes foam for mattresses and chairs. The facilities themselves are quite impressive, often with relatively new equipment (on average 30-40 years-old, but with some very new 1-5 years-old equipment), though normally the automation is kept minimal (as you would expect). There’s also a lot less safety precautions than the US (which you would also expect, but for some reason I didn’t think it would be to this degree). Lastly, most companies seem very operations focused, which makes sense considering that many companies here have difficulty following through on their business plans.Normally, the most challenging aspect of these businesses for us is their books. They are quite hard to decipher because not only are they in French, but the translations don’t often make sense (i.e. stocks is actually inventory, materials is equipment, etc). Just to make things interesting, the accounting rules here are significantly different, so we have to recalculate what we are looking for. All of this said, these are small problems that just require some effort from our group to fix. We are all still confident that we will make a significant impact while we are here.
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