Plus: Smarter money, why Eskom won’t invest in SA startups & Shoprite’s play into fashion retail.

Newsletter

April 11, 2023

Hi there,

Seems 17-time Grammy Winning artist Sting was onto something with his 1993 hit song as Stanford Medicine Scientists use machine learning to discover the shape of your heart (roundness in particular) could predict heart disease.

In this Open Letter:

Make it sexy: Kickstarting the 3D-printed home revolution.
SA’s first self-service clothing shop, Eskom won’t invest in SA startups & the world’s biggest rocket.
Money smarts: How one student’s hobby became one of SA’s fastest-growing FinEd platforms.

TRENDING NOW

Mortar Being Sexy

Where are all our 3D-printed homes at?

For over a decade, the prospect of a 3D-printed home revolution has captured our imagination. With a global property market valued at an astonishing R6 Quadrillion in 2020 and the South African market at about R300 billion, there's certainly a lucrative opportunity waiting to be seized.

3D-printed houses promise to be 730% faster to build, more environmentally friendly, and more energy-efficient. Over the last eight years, search trends show a 204% increase in interest in this technology. Yet, the 3D-printed home revolution hasn't materialized. Why?

The concept of 3D-printed homes hasn't gained much traction in South Africa. Despite 24% of the population living in slum conditions and meeting just 8.3% of our country's annual low-cost housing demand, using 3D printing to solve the housing issues faced in SA remained underexplored until recently.

Rethinking the Approach

South Africa's first 3D-printed house was built about 10 months ago by the University of Johannesburg, using a printer supplied by a Dutch startup. Intriguingly, it was an RDP house. And with that, the government announced last month it will pilot a 3D-printed house programme, albeit as part of a 10-year plan to utilize more of the technology to solve the housing backlog.

*Joe finally found a use for the countless hours playing Tetris as a teenager.*

But just how practical is 3D printing RDP houses?

Well for one, the current means aren’t working and it seems those in line are losing hope. Searches for RDP houses have declined by 59% since 2015, suggesting that generating excitement in this area may be challenging.

Is 3D printing of houses the silver bullet?

The current backlog of housing is estimated at 2.4 million and with a printer taking 24 hours to print a house, one printer can print a maximum of 365 houses per year. Considering the government’s 10-year plan, we will need ±6500 printers working non-stop to build the required houses. Probably not practical.

Perhaps we must reconsider our approach: Instead of focusing on 3D-printed homes as an immediate low-cost housing solution, why not target affluent buyers?

The Allure of Luxury

Envision the impact of this technology being embraced by the upper-middle class or even the top 1%. What would that look like, and how could we reimagine the technology for this market segment?

Consider the possibilities:

3D-printing a multi-story mansion in just one day
Demolishing and rebuilding custom homes every six months
Constructing an entire island resort in a week
Creating ultramodern, gravity-defying architectural designs
Building a new holiday home while driving from Johannesburg to Cape Town
Developing ever-changing, kaleidoscope-like communities

Hardware startups are often considered more complex and costly than their software counterparts and it's uncertain what will ultimately spark this new housing revolution. However, given the immense opportunities in the 3D-printed housing market, it's only a matter of time before a local startup enters the arena and capitalises on this untapped potential.

IN SHORT

Shoprite launches UNIQ clothing store brand: It’s SA’s first clothing retailer to offer self-service checkout, as smart tags and advanced radio-frequency identification (RFID) let you grab, scan and pay don't the go.

Yeah, thanks for that: Eskom’s pension fund is launching a VC, with some R185 billion’s worth of assets. But they are NOT planning on investing in SA – because it’s just so much harder to run a successful startup in a country with loadshedding, right?

Troubled Unicorn, Flutterwave, cannot seem to escape controversy – there have been reports of multiple hacks where money was moved off-platform to buy USDT via Binance, but Flutterware denies it.

AI will soon read your thoughts: Making mind-to-machine interaction seamless, which could be ground-breaking for tech like robotic limbs if we can sort out the ethics around it.

Doc-GPT: Apparently everyone’s favourite new toy just passed the US Medical Licensing exam, and it’s so good at diagnosing rare diseases, one doc wants it to take the Hippocratic oath.

Going boldly: SpaceX says its new Starship-class rocket is ready – they want to rehearse-launch next week, then go to orbit the week after (pending regulatory approval). It’s awesome since Starship can carry 100 people into space (93 more than Dragon), making it the biggest rocket ever built.

NEW NEWSLETTER

Fin Yourself Up

Recently we covered the rise in the adoption of EasyEquities, the result of a trend that is seeing more younger people go without brokers in their investing. But navigating the tides of the stock market and various financial products can be overwhelming.

What started out as one student’s hobby of making stock-pick videos ended up becoming one of SA’s fastest-growing financial education communities. FinMeUp is on a mission to equip both the new and experienced with great local and international investment insights:

200+ years of combined investment experience in their mentor network (which shares updates on their app)
Almost 12 000 community members
Amount of money saved through making better investment decisions? Well, that’s hard to track. But the community is loving it.

We love the content FinMeUp is putting out there and think you will like it too. Check out their latest newsletter if you are keen to get the latest listed company news, stock analysis and financial education.

The Recap with FinMeUpYour weekly boost with top company news, insightful stock analysis, and a power-packed educational nugget.

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