If you frequent social media, you may have come across the recent blog Go F*ck Yourself Cape Town written by someone who clearly hadn’t sample everything that’s great about Cape Town. Fortunately counter blogs challenged the view with the best professing that Pofadder was actually the superior place to live.

With some of the claims being that ‘our business comes from Joburg‘ and that ‘they (Joburgers) pay for us Capetonians’ we thought to highlight Cape Town’s business value and contribution to our economy:

Financial robust city

• Cape Town 2^nd richest city in South Africa in terms of gross domestic product (GDP) per capita and contributes 10% towards South Africa’s GDP
• Moody’s rate Cape Town as AA3, one of the highest in SA. Strengths include prudent financial management, robust liquidity, moderate debt to budget volumes and a large diversified economic base.
• Cape Town airport is the best airport in Africa and ranked 22^nd in the world.

A port city

• Cape Town is the 2^nd busiest container port in South Africa and situated on one of the world’s busiest trade routes. It handles the largest amount of fruit in SA with the only unbroken cold storage facility port.
• Cape Town has one of the largest deep water habours in Africa for the ship repair industry.
• Over 50% of boat building in SA takes place in Cape Town and we’re the 2^nd largest producers of catamarans in the world.

Growing energy sector

• Due to Cape Town’s location to West African oilfields and oil rig serving at Cape Town and Saldanha, Oil and Gas is a key sector.
• Our renewable energy sector is growing due to the Independent Power Producers Programme, our local skills and support from Western Cape Government, DTI and Green Cape.

Our knowledge economy – financial services, business services, ICT, BPO, creative industries

• Greater Cape Town has a dominant financial services and business services sectors with asset management being a large sub-sector. 22.5% of services exported from South Africa are from the WC.
• In BPO, SA has won National Outsourcing Association (UK) Offshoring Destination of the Year 2012; European Outsourcing Association Offshoring Destination of the Year 2013.
• We have a growing tech sector, 6,000 Silicon Cape members and an environment supporting entrepreneurship and start-ups. Successes include the acquisition of Fundamo by Visa, MXit.
• Our film industry is very well respected globally. Excellent skill sets, technology that’s ahead of the curve and production experience result in major international productions in Cape Town especially with the Cape Town Film Studios.

Agri and Agri processing

• The Western Cape contributes 22.9% to SA agriculture which is important for food security.
• Agricultural and Agri-Processing accounts for 49% or R30billion of Western Cape product exports in 2012 and our world-class infrastructure and counter-seasonality to Europe making Europe our biggest market.

Tourism including business travellers

• Just in case people don’t know how awesome Cape Town is as a tourist destination – Cape Town Awards! And this contributes to GDP as well.
• Cape Town is the number one conference destination in Africa. With world class conference facilities, the CTICC hosted 537 events for 1.35m people with 35% international visitors in 2013.

Education, research and innovation

• Cape Town is Africa’s most innovative city according to Innovation Cities Program, Innovation Cities Emerging Index 2012-2013
• The Western Cape hosts one of the highest concentrations of medical device and biotechnology companies, research institutes and research groups in South Africa.
• Four major universities within the region – 94 000 students;  a large number of National Research Foundation A rated scientists; 39 research chairs by the NRF under the South African Research Chairs Initiative; and  a number of national Centres of Excellence.