Three brothers who removed the upfront cost of switching to cooking gas for thousands of township households in Gauteng have been named South Africa’s top emerging entrepreneurs.
Lwando, Simnikiwe and Lwazi Ndlangalavu, founders of PB Gaz, won the Emerging Business Entrepreneur of the Year® title at the 38th annual Business Partners Limited Entrepreneur of the Year® awards. The category recognises entrepreneurs who have run their business for between one and five years, with turnover of up to R10 million. The brothers opened their first LPG outlet in Kempton Park in July 2023, bringing together backgrounds in energy, banking and finance. Lwando runs the business as CEO, Simnikiwe as COO and Lwazi as CFO. They set out to sell cooking gas to households that relied on paraffin, coal and wood, and saw that the deposit on a gas cylinder was the main barrier to switching for many families, most of whom have irregular incomes. PB Gaz became the first formal LPG retailer in its areas to remove that deposit. Customers can pay as they go for micro-refills, or join a rent-to-own plan that transfers ownership of the cylinder after twelve months. Small businesses get bulk pricing, and registered schools have their own pricing plan. Orders are placed on WhatsApp and delivered free to the customer’s door within 24 hours, with a safety check on every cylinder. Every new customer gets free safety training, in person or by WhatsApp video, and there is a 24-hour emergency line. PB Gaz also runs free monthly safety workshops open to anyone in the community, and gives LPG safety talks to children and teachers at local primary schools. The brothers built their own digital system to run the business. It includes a point-of-sale system that records how much gas each customer uses, a customer app that earns loyalty points on every refill, and a referral scheme that rewards customers for bringing in new ones.
The business now runs three branches in Kempton Park, Kaalfontein and Ivory Park, serving between 5 700 and 6 800 households a month and selling around 19,6 tons of LPG. Its customers also include spaza shops, street food vendors, small restaurants, caterers and creches, many of which use gas as backup during power cuts. It supplies public schools that need reliable gas to cook daily meals under the National School Nutrition Programme.
PB Gaz has also been preselected as an implementation partner for the G20 Clean Cooking Legacy Programme, which supports households in moving to cleaner cooking fuels. Eight in ten of its branch staff are hired from the communities it serves, and the business aims for a workforce that is half women and half young people. The brothers plan to grow from three branches to eight, expanding into Ebony Park, Mayibuye, Tswelopele and Winnie Mandela and creating 34 new jobs. They also plan to add bulk tanker supply for schools and commercial clients, and a wholesale cylinder exchange for spaza shops. They are seeking donor funding to subsidise starter packs, each with a stove and a 9kg cylinder, for low-income households headed by women. The brothers estimate that switching to LPG saves a family between R1 300 and R3 500 a year in fuel costs. “Clean cooking programmes only reach households when someone is prepared to deliver gas to their door at a price they can manage, and PB Gaz has shown that this can work as a business,” says Gugu Mjadu of Business Partners Limited.“Lwando, Simnikiwe and Lwazi are serving thousands of homes and supplying schools within a few years of opening a single outlet, with a clean safety record, which matters more in LPG than in almost any other kind of retail.”For more information, go to https://www.eoy.co.za.
