Austrian Foreign Affairs and Integration Minister Sebastian Kurz used a business forum in Johannesburg this week to highlight regulatory stability and predictability as a “necessary condition” for future investment into South Africa and the rest of the continent.

Kurz, 30, is Austria’s youngest-ever Foreign Minister, having been appointed to the post in December 2013, when he was still in his twenties.

Participating in the largest Austrian business mission to Africa in 20 years, Kurz indicated that Austrian business was increasingly alive to Africa’s economic potential. However, he stressed the need for legal and regulatory certainty, while also highlighting the European country's strengths in renewable energy, education and training, engineering and science and technology.

Austria’s development finance institution, Oesterreichische Entwicklungsbank, is supporting the African Renewable Energy Fund, to facilitate investment into renewable-energy projects in sub-Saharan Africa by providing equity capital and know-how for project preparation and implementation.

South Africa has, until recently, been successful in rapidly scaling up its nascent renewables sector through a series of competitive auctions, which have resulted in over 100 projects and nearly R200-billion in investment. However, the programme has been thrown into question, with State-owned utility Eskom resisting stated energy policy by spurning the signing of new power purchase agreements.

Speaking from the same platform as Kurz, Department of Trade and Industry director-general Lionel October highlighted the renewable-energy sector – along with rail rolling stock, automobiles and shipbuilding – as central to government’s reindustrialisation vision.

“South Africa is open for business,” October stressed, indicating that the country was keen to attract more manufacturing investors, including in the production of renewable-energy components.

He also urged Austrian firms to look beyond the country’s sub-1% economic growth performance and focus, instead, on its “fundamentals” – the country’s proximity to a growing African market, its youthful population and growing middle class.

October also urged Austrian business to embrace South Africa’s broad-based black economic empowerment (BBBEE) rules describing them as a “win-win”, in that successful transformation would help expand the buying power of South Africa as more black South Africans joined the ranks of the middle class.

“We are looking to accelerated black economic empowerment,” October said, adding that BBBEE is “imperative” for any firm wishing to conduct business with government or State-owned companies.

Both Kurz and October lauded the long-term nature of relations between the two countries, with the Austria trade commission in Johannesburg having marked its sixtieth year of operations in mid-October.

In 2015, total trade between Austria and South Africa amounted to R7.8-billion, heavily weighted in Austria’s favour with exports to South Africa of R6.8-billion.  South Africa ranks sixth among Austria's overseas trading partners and is the country’s major trading partner in Africa.

South African direct investment in Austria is also larger, at R43-billion, than the R10-billion-worth of Austrian total direct investment in South Africa.  Major South African businesses in Austria include paper groups Mondi and Sappi.