May is the company mid-year that coincides with D&S's founding in 1946, now 78 years ago! Very few companies anywhere achieve this longevity, especially under the same family ownership and Founders Day is duly celebrated Group-wide to celebrate the occasion. In Kenya the event also marked groundbreaking at the new Tatu Engineering Centre, the Group's priority project that will provide the resource base for our ever expanding engineering and technical activities.

Apart from the activities various awards and milestones are marked, particularly long service and retirements. This year we celebrated twenty-six 10-year awards and two 25-year awards to Charles Thairu and Beatrice Ndung’u who also retired as did Johnson Kimari after 34 years of service. All have made huge contributions during their time with us and I am most grateful for their dedication and commitment.

As always D&S continues to progress and there have been several recent initiatives of note. An important one has been opening of two new Kenya branches in Limuru and Migori and the transfer of Mombasa Downtown to a more suitable compact premises nearby. In Zambia a branch has been established in Leopards Hill, Lusaka all having started strongly. Expanding the branch network is a key strategy for the Group with the current count being 102 as we make our products more accessible to the market and fulfil our purpose of improving lives. Another recent focus has been the Solar segment with many new initiatives taken including establishing partnerships with tier one PV manufacturer Trina to regionally distribute their very competitive modules and Huawei to distribute their technology leading inverters and power supply solutions. These products complement an expanded range of updated solar pumps, lithium batteries and hot water heaters to provide the most competitive range of solar solutions available.

Finally I must particularly commend Ken Muturi and his team for the work they have done in developing the various D&S Apps. The updated D&S FLO App was awarded best e-commerce mobile app at the recent industry awards ceremony and now an updated D&S reference App has also been launched. The D&S website is also in the top 100,000 in the Alexa rankings, the second-best industry ranking worldwide! There are several other Apps in development that give excellent reference information on the D&S product range though in the meantime readers should check the available Apps and see for themselves the exceptional standards of Ken and his team's work - it's all world class!