Cobus van der Merwe is a former army man who has managed to carve out an impressive second career in defence technology. He’s an experienced negotiation team leader in both partnership establishment and contract closure in land warfare and aviation systems. He is currently a senior executive specialising in electronic warfare at Saab Grintek Defense, based in Centurion, South Africa.
Cobus has extensive experience in leading defence-level operational test and evaluation teams and performing customer value engineering. In this conversation, taped a couple of months ago, Cobus shares insights gleaned from an extensive defence career which straddled the seismic shifts which occurred within South Africa’s socio-economic landscape over the last three or four decades.
Theme music by Brian Lupiya. Used with permission.
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Cobus van der Merwe is a former army man who has managed to carve out an impressive second career in defence technology. He’s an experienced negotiation team leader in both partnership establishment and contract closure in land warfare and aviation systems. He is currently a senior executive specialising in electronic warfare at Saab Grintek Defense, based in Centurion, South Africa.
Cobus has extensive experience in leading defence-level operational test and evaluation teams and performing customer value engineering. In this conversation, taped a couple of months ago, Cobus shares insights gleaned from an extensive defence career which straddled the seismic shifts which occurred within South Africa’s socio-economic landscape over the last three or four decades.
Theme music by Brian Lupiya. Used with permission.
Chad Larson is one of the three founders of the Kenyan solar power start-up M-KOPA Solar. He serves as the company’s Finance Director and Chief Credit Officer and has lived in Nairobi with his wife and three boys since the company launched in 2011.
Chad is a qualified CFA and an Oxford MBA who previously served as the CFO of the Africap Microfinance Investment Fund, based in Johannesburg, and prior to that, he spent 10 years in the investment banking division of Bank of America in Sydney and New York, working on fixed income, structured finance, and derivative transactions.
M-KOPA Solar is aiming to be a $1 billion company by providing pay-as-you-go energy to off-grid homes. To that end, the company successfully closed a $19 million round of financing led by Generation Investment Management LLP in December 2015.
Theme music by Brian Lupiya. Used with permission.
Additional music by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
African Tech Conversations
Cobus van der Merwe is a former army man who has managed to carve out an impressive second career in defence technology. He’s an experienced negotiation team leader in both partnership establishment and contract closure in land warfare and aviation systems. He is currently a senior executive specialising in electronic warfare at Saab Grintek Defense, based in Centurion, South Africa.
Cobus has extensive experience in leading defence-level operational test and evaluation teams and performing customer value engineering. In this conversation, taped a couple of months ago, Cobus shares insights gleaned from an extensive defence career which straddled the seismic shifts which occurred within South Africa’s socio-economic landscape over the last three or four decades.
Theme music by Brian Lupiya. Used with permission.
