Debar Ceramics is a black women-owned company that supplies and installs wear-resistant materials for the mining, power-generation, construction, and cement-manufacturing industries. In addition to our main business, we began to diversify our interests into services such as industrial plant-cleaning services and have also been testing bird and wildlife injury-mitigation products for Eskom with the Endangered Wildlife Trust.

The company was established in 2013 as a broad-based black women-owned enterprise-development initiative under the directorship of Letsosa Matona and was in the premium incubation programme of the Black Umbrellas business-development hub (previously known as Shanduka Black Umbrellas) in Lephalale, where the company is based.

The owners of the company identified a need for a black women-owned company within the industry of wear-resistant linings in the Lephalale area and nationwide, as the five major role players were majority white-owned and in the Gauteng and Mpumalanga provinces.

Debar Ceramics was enrolled and accepted into the Black Umbrellas’ Lephalale enterprise-development hub in 2015 and we have now graduated after our third year of premium residential incubation programme. During our first year of the incubation programme, our MD, Letsosa Matona, received intensive business training and mentorship and Debar Ceramics was reported to be amongst the best-performing small businesses within the Lephalale incubation. We later received the following regional and national awards:

• Mining
• Mineral Beneficiation
• Power Generation
• Iron and Steel
• Base and Precious Metal Smelting
• Cement and Lime Manufacture
• Petro-Chemical Refining & Production