Anglobal – Business Focus

When people write about economic development in Angola, the story is almost always told from the outside in – foreign investment arriving, big international companies setting up. That story is real, it is fair, and it is needed. But there is another story told much less often. The 100% Angolan-owned engineering group Anglobal tells the other side of that story.  Since 2003, Anglobal has been building the physical infrastructure that Angola’s telecoms and energy sectors run on – towers, fibre networks, data centres, solar panel systems, and the steel structures that hold them up.

“Building is only part of the story. Our biggest business by far is operations and maintenance – keeping all of that running, every day, across the whole country,” says Nuno Costa, Chief Financial Officer of Anglobal. “That is more than 60% of what we do in Angola. Anyone can build a site. Keeping thousands of them alive, from Cabinda to Cunene – very few can do that.”

This has been part of the company from the start. When Anglobal built its first telecom site in 2004, it also signed its first maintenance contract.

Today, Anglobal has offices in Benguela and Luanda, and over 800 employees in the parent company alone. The Group’s five arms include Anglobal, the parent company, international operations in Cape Verde and Portugal, where there is a procurement and engineering office, a share in telecom infrastructure sharing business, Antosc, and the fully owned subsidiary Galvostahl, which is taking Anglobal into metalworks and galvanising.

 

Nationwide Coverage

As a thoroughly Angolan company, it is one of the very few companies to have people in every province in Angola.

“Where there is a network, we are there,” Costa says. “Our competitors cover Luanda and the main routes. When a client needs work done in a far-away province, they have to send people there. We are already there.”

With warehouses in key places around the country, Anglobal also holds the full service records of almost 2,000 sites.

“That means we know what is going to fail before it fails,” says Costa.

It is not just the people who are Angolan. Importantly, the money is also 100% Angolan.

“Angolan capital, Angolan management, and this is where our shareholders live,” Costa points out. “Most of the companies we compete with are branches of foreign groups, or they fly in for a project and fly out again. We are not going anywhere.”

Finally, Anglobal’s work in operations and maintenance sets it apart.

“A contractor hands over the job and moves on. We live with what we build, for years. It makes you much more careful about how you build it,” Costa explains. “And it only works because of the coverage – you cannot look after thousands of sites around the country from one city.”

 

Bringing Industry Home

Anglobal has also taken important steps to bring more value into Angola itself. It has become increasingly difficult to bring foreign currency into Angola, making it difficult to import telecoms towers.

“The tower itself is a big part of what a site costs. So our ability to deliver depended more and more on a currency payment we did not control,” says Costa. “So in 2020 we bought two industrial units – metalworks and galvanising – through the State privatisation programme. That is Galvostahl today.”

Instead of importing finished towers, Anglobal only needs to import some of the raw steel to make those towers itself. Galvostahl does not only serve Anglobal – it sells to other companies, including some of the biggest names working here. The company holds ISO 9001, 14001 and 45001 certifications, and both Anglobal and Antosc are large taxpayers in Angola.

“What started as a way to protect our own supply chain became a business in its own right,” Costa says. “It is keeping the value in Angola.”

That value was particularly evident during Covid.

“Think about what a lockdown meant in Angola. People at home, and work, school, health care and payments all suddenly running on the network,” Costa says. If a site goes down at a time like that, a whole community goes down with it. We kept the network running across the whole country.”

That philosophy of focusing on talent within Angola is reflected in its hiring process. 99% of Anglobal’s staff are Angolan.

“That is not a social responsibility target, it is how the business works. You cannot cover this whole country with Expats,” says Costa. “We have the Anglobal Academy, using outside trainers, but also our own certified staff. That matters: what our people learn in the field stays in the company and gets passed on.”

Anglobal also promotes Angolan innovation through Cacimba, our talent programme. The projects built for this programme are not just science fair exhibits. Teams build and present real projects. Costa points proudly to the mobile telecom station designed by a recent winning team – the company is now developing that project to build it.

“If the idea is good, we build it,” he says.

It is an environment that encourages talent to stay with the company – Costa says the number he is most proud of is that one third of the staff have been there more than a decade, including himself.

“I joined in 2014 as a technician in the finance department. Today I am the CFO,” he recalls. “I am not the only one – that is how this company grows, from the inside out.”

 

Infrastructure and Restructuring

Looking to the future, Costa has three key priorities. The first is energy. Anglobal has thousands of telecom sites, many in places with unreliable or no public grid support, so it’s a familiar challenge.

“We are now going to sell it as a product of its own, to anyone with the same problem: industry, mining, farming, health care,” Costa says. “Clean and efficient energy that gets companies away from diesel.”

The firm is potentially able to cut its clients’ diesel bills by up to 70%. The company also has an energy rental fleet offering 15 to 1,200 kVA.

“This is not just a plan – it is a business that already exists, and one we want to grow,” says Costa.

Galvostahl closes that circle. It builds the steel structures that hold up telecom towers and the ones that hold up solar panels. Its factory is not only an answer to imports – it is the industrial base for Anglobal’s energy plans.

Costa is also looking to widen the client base. Telecoms has always been the biggest part of the firm’s work, with the sector growing so fast that it was bigger than any contracts Anglobal won in other sectors. Now that market has matured, Anglobal is looking to widen its offering.

“Sharing infrastructure is now normal in Angola. It lets operators turn CAPEX into OPEX,” says Costa. “That is exactly what Antosc does.”

With exciting growth around data centres and Africa’s digital economy, there is plenty of work for Anglobal to do.

“We built the first data center outside Luanda, back in 2006. It is ground we know well,” Costa adds.

But he is also excited about the internal changes in Anglobal’s future.

“We are in the middle of the biggest restructuring this company has ever done,” he says. “We have redesigned every internal process and built our own platform. This is what will make everything else possible.”

And all of this will continue to be achieved with Angolan money, Angolan management and Angolan engineers.

“Angola’s economy will not grow beyond oil just because someone from outside decides to invest – it will grow because there are companies here willing to put their own money into industry and into the long term,” concludes Costa. “We are one of them, and we are not the only one.”