Datatec: A shooting star in the IT firmament 1989–2000

Abstract

As the title suggests, Datatec was, for a brief period one of the stars of the Johannesburg Stock Exchange. Its extraordinary experience showed how a small enterprise in sanction-hounded South Africa was able to take advantage of the new political dispensation in 1994 to list on the JSE and move rapidly into the expanding information technology market. The times were propitious. The developed economies of the world were experiencing a Schumpeterian fifth long wave of technological innovation based on the personal computer, the creation of the internet and cell phone telephony. American technology made it possible and America remained the main source of innovation throughout the 1990s. The introduction and application of the new technology, though, depended to a great extent upon the existence of local entrepreneurs and the existence of an entrepreneur-friendly environment. Both existed in South Africa in the mid-1990s.