Diversified consumer and engineering products group Hudaco has faced a challenging start to the 2024 financial year, with the reduction in loadshedding negatively impacting on some of its alternative energy businesses, resulting in an overall lacklustre set of interim results. “It’s been a rather challenging six months for us, I think for most of South African business. There was reduced loadshedding, but we have an up and down factor in that, when there is loadshedding, we have some businesses that tend to perform well, but when there’s no loadshedding, that business kind of falls away,” Hudaco CEO Graham Dunford said at the release of Hudaco’s interim results for the six months ended May 31.