Mathibe manufacturing
What does your company do?
We currently supplying energy solution products to the local stores such as firewood, biomass briquettes and biomass firestarters that are made from the waste that we get from the trees. We also have a 1 hectare vegetable garden that we have planted vegetables that we sell to the community members and to the vendors that are reselling to the end users. The space that we are working from was used as a dumping site and we have transformed the space to be a place that we can plant from. Our energy products are supplied to the local stores and events companies. We have 2 employees working for us on a full time basis and 5 on an adhoc basis.
What is your biggest success?
Achieving an award at the gauteng premier women excellence award 2025 for innovation category
Nominated for advocacy award at GUZAGUZA 2023
Top 10 Go vrou business competition 2021
Being featured on the soilsista magazine 2023
What has been your biggest hurdle?
The hurdle that I have experienced in the business was when I was operating an ice making business in and in 2018 our power was cut off for 160 households and this affected my business and we lost all our clients. In mid 2019 mid year we decided to pivot and the business was slowly picking up and we have already started looking for clients and the world was strikes by covid and we could not go out to look for more clients. Then after everything was starting to stabilize after covid we experienced the looting in soweto and some of the clients that we were servicing closed their businesses and this had a serious impact on our business and it really affected our cash flow. We ended up having to sell some of our assets(bakkies) to be able to survive. We are currently on the recovery phase of the business and the most hurdle that we are faced is being to get our resources easily in order to improve our cash flow. We have to outsource the services of transport in order to acquire our stock from the suppliers.
