IBM in SA

Here's an interesting fact. during the 1970's IBM boycotted South Africa because of Apartheid. We literally pulled all of our resources out of the country and stopped selling here until they became a democracy.

This makes for a very interesting dynamic because not many companies did a thing like that (also known as the "right thing"). Because of this, we are not the number one player in the marketplace, in fact, we're not even the number two or three, I think the General Manager of SA told us that we're number four. While we were gone for 20 years or so, local competitors popped up and took over the marketplace.

IBM still struggles today to claim share back, in particular without any advertising. I'm not sure why we don't have any advertising here, but apparently, if you talk to locals, they aren't even sure that IBM came back after apartheid ended. The place that we're going is going to be even more-so isolated from IBM so hopefully we'll be able to have both a significant impact for the area and also the company.