BNC#9 | Sasol CEO Simon Baloyi: Turning around an SA giant through Trump, tariffs and turmoil

He started out as a bursary student from a village with no electricity or running water. Now Simon Baloyi runs one of South Africa's biggest industrial employers. In his first full year as CEO (2024) he turned a loss of nearly R70 a share into double-digit profit. Baloyi's BNC#9 keynote takes us inside that turnaround: the internal battle to hold the strategy together through Trump's tariffs, the balance sheet target that will decide when dividends return, and why Sasol isn't walking away from coal just yet. This is the story of a company built on getting oil out of coal, told by the man now betting his career on getting it right.