American Means Business in South Africa : Investment: He is one of the first entrepreneurs from the U.S. to make a substantial investment in the country since sanctions were lifted.

American investment in the person of an energetic printing entrepreneur may be more than white South Africans counted on, and less than black South Africans envisioned.

Albert J. Alletzhauser shook up Johannesburg’s staid business community in July when he purchased a third of a 30-year-old printing house, gathered enough support from other stockholders to take over as chief executive and ousted most of the old board of directors.

Now he’s building a new factory, courting black-run businesses and vowing that his Penrose Holdings Limited will challenge South Africa’s larger publishing businesses.

Alletzhauser, who is white, says a combination of “profit and altruism” brought him to South Africa. He talks of training black managers and a willingness to do business with Africans. Still, he is no crusader.

“Being apolitical, I stay out of the politics. I don’t see the violence,” he said.

He has insulated his family--his wife, Anne, is on the Penrose board and they have a 3-year-old daughter and a 1-year-old son--in the Johannesburg and Cape Town neighborhoods of privileged white South Africans.

“This is a wonderful country to grow up in,” he said.

Despite unrest that has killed more than 11,000 black people over the past three years, uncertainty about the country’s political future and the bitter legacy of apartheid, Alletzhauser saw opportunity in South Africa’s re-emergence from economic isolation and the dismantling of apartheid.

The lure of doing business here, he said, is created by the demise of once-protected monopolies and “market forces coming in.”

The 33-year-old native of Madison, Conn., wealthy from investments in the Hong Kong and British stock markets, spent 2 million rand, worth about $600,000, to buy into Penrose.

South Africa’s financial press welcomed him as one of the first significant investors since U.S. anti-apartheid sanctions were lifted.

Alletzhauser sits in an office in a warehouse district just outside downtown Johannesburg. From his window, he can see the girders of his new factory, scheduled for completion early next year, which will contain a $2-million, six-color press--”the newest press in Africa,” he said.

“Nobody knows whether this country’s going to hell or going straight the other way,” he said. “I’m putting my money where I believe the future lies. And, up or down, there’s going to be a lot of money to be made.”

Alletzhauser said South African businesses are inefficient after decades of isolation. He has shown himself ready to attack what he calls “deadwood.” Three of the Penrose directors replaced in the July shake-up had just voted themselves large pay increases.

Alletzhauser’s takeover made headlines in South Africa.

“Our business culture is not as aggressive as the American style. It’s more laid back,” said Denis Worrall, a new member of the Penrose board.

Worrall, an international financial consultant and former South African ambassador to Britain, speaks admiringly of Alletzhauser’s influence on Penrose.

“He stressed the whole question of accountability . . . the right to ask penetrating questions at public shareholders’ meetings,” Worrall said.

Alletzhauser said he believes Americans have an advantage here because they are willing to take “a very aggressive stance toward marketing and reorganizing.”

He also said Americans can have an impact because they “don’t care whether someone’s black, white or red. They come into this market, they’re ready to tap talent.”

A tour of Penrose shows black workers in the bindery, the mail room and at the controls of the presses, but none in management. Alletzhauser, who employs 130, says he hopes to appoint blacks to decision-making posts within three years.

“Everyone in America perceives South Africa as the unethical place to do business,” he said. “But my wife and I felt in 1992 that, within a year, it would be unethical not to. Unethical because the one way to . . . empower people who have been trodden on for 40 or 50 years is to give them jobs.”

Black South Africans welcome jobs and money, but they are also looking for another kind of investment: a concerted effort to put black people in control of business.

Alletzhauser endorsed a South African Council of Churches voluntary “code of conduct,” which calls on companies to provide employee training and buy goods and services from black-owned South African businesses.

The African National Congress, which is expected to win the nation’s first multiracial vote next year and form a new government, would write laws requiring companies to hire black people at all levels in numbers proportional to their 70% majority in the population.

Aziz Pahad, deputy director of the ANC’s department of international affairs, says that under apartheid, foreign companies worked hard to pull black people into their South African enterprises.

Now, Pahad said, foreigners should not be frightened away by the ANC’s affirmative action plans--which he prefers to call a blueprint for “black empowerment.”

“If investors have socially responsible attitudes, it should encourage them,” he said. “The World Bank itself came to the conclusion that unless we change the structure of ownership and control, we cannot have stability.”

While Alletzhauser acknowledged that apartheid has left black people ill-prepared to compete with whites, he expressed discomfort with enforced affirmative action.

“South Africa should be a meritocracy, so that color of skin is not ever an issue in promoting somebody,” he said.

Alletzhauser said he stresses education, and is even helping train the sales staff of a black competitor after discovering that few non-whites ran printing companies in South Africa.

“I’ll do what’s right, not what’s forced upon me,” he said.