A great set of financial results from Woolies for the year through June, and since ditching the rusty anchor that was David Jones, things are starting to look a little rosier. This was evident across a range of metrics and no less so than in its HEPS – a generally accepted indicator of profitability – which came out 35.6% higher for the year. The completion of the sale of the crusty Australian department store in March this year took around R18bn in liabilities off the Woolies balance sheet, leaving the Dapper One to refocus its efforts on building profitability in other business areas. Looking now at the individual business units, Food growth accelerated throughout the year, but particularly in H2, while Fashion, Beauty and Home grew +8.9%, and is reportedly “trading ahead of the market”. And although Australian shoppers are under pressure, the Country Road Group came out positively thanks to a very good start to the year. The Group is looking forward to its next period of investment and growth, with a planned CAPEX spend of R10bn over the next three years.

Comment: The ship has been steadied, now comes the time to set sail on the high seas. For more on yesterday’s results, read our handy and informative summary here.

In its 2023 ‘Most Valuable South African Brands’ report, Kantar BrandZ has rated Clicks as the top brand for ‘experience and function’, and the ‘most meaningful brand’ overall. A meaningful brand, according to Kantar, creates clear and consistent functional and emotional connections with consumers, meeting people’s needs in a way that demonstrates warmth. “Everything we do is centred around delivering convenience, value and a truly personalised customer experience to make us the customers’ first choice for pharmacy, health, wellness and beauty,” confirms Head of Marketing Dr Mel Van Rooy. And the awards keep rolling in: Clicks also garnered, if that’s the word, a Product of the Year 2023 award in the Baby Care category for its own-label Made 4 Baby DryProtect nappies range. Product of the Year, you’ll recall, is the accepted consumer-voted arbiter globally for product innovation.

Comment: Well-deserved recognition for a business – and a brand – that goes from strength to strength.

Every year, as the first green blades emerge from the scorched and blasted Highveld pastures, the people of South Africa crown the new Boerewors King, or indeed Queen, as a symbol of rebirth and a celebration of what may be achieved with ground meat and a handful of spices. The winner of the 2023 Shoprite and Checkers Championship Boerewors competition is 31-year-old Wellington chef Tyron Adams (31) who beat a field of finalists, many of them from his hometown, to achieve the crown. In addition to receiving the ceremonial Fortuner and a pile of cash, Tyrone will also see his winning recipe made flesh, as it were, in the chillers of Shoprite and Checkers stores around the country over the next year. Last year Shoprite sold 7,155km of Championship Wors, which would pretty much take you to Cairo with enough extra to wrap around the pyramids. Staying with Shoprite, in the face of a number of accidents involving Sixty60 delivery drivers, the business has issued a statement to the effect that while the drivers are independent contractors, they receive extensive training on safety protocols and accident procedures, and defensive and anti-hijacking driving technique.

Comment: A necessary duty to the operators who make this service a success.

We had occasion, recently, to park the Tatler yacht off the rocky coast of Croatia, where we discovered a confusing array of supermarkets: Plodine, Tommy Hipermarket, Trgovina, and the tersely named Konzum. And then, of course SPAR, that beacon of red and green, reasonable prices and even some familiar brands for the weary traveller in a sea of retail confusion. SPAR has 133 stores in the country so far (Konzum, the biggest retailer, has 700) but has plans for aggressive expansion. It’s a subsidiary there of Austrian SPAR International AG (ASPIAG). Over in the US, Walmart will give its roughly 50,000 non-store employees access to a generative AI app trained on corporate information. The new ‘My Assistant’ feature on the company’s existing ‘Me@Campus’ app will help with a range of tasks from summarising long documents to assisting in the creation of new content, combining content from Walmart with third-party large language models (LLMs) that Walmart declined to identify. “GenAI can help us work faster and more efficiently, but it also has limitations: it lacks judgment, has a limited understanding of context and is only as good as the data it’s trained on,” says Walmart.

Comment: It begins.

A profit warning from RCL FOODS, the third this financial year, in which the business advises that HEPS are likely to come in at 39% to 46% lower YoY for the 12 months through June. Previously, it was predicting a decline of around 30%. What gives? “The decline from the comparative period is largely driven by the impact of the special levy raised by the South African Sugar Association on the group’s sugar business unit, unrecovered feed costs in Rainbow and the significant impact of load-shedding across all operations in the current period,” says the update. The special levy has been covered in these pages before. RCL FOODS also notes that it will likely take a “negative fair value adjustment” of R127.4m from its association with US-based plant-protein outfit The LiveKindly Collective, in which it took a small interest last year.

Comment: Plant-based proteins have been targeted by big meat both in the fridges and in the press, and across the board have not yet delivered the expected returns for investors.

First, farewell to Nesquik, an iconic brand and a staple of the after-school kitchen counter but now according to owner Nestlé not making the sales it used to. Next, there was a time when we of the Tatler did not need to concern ourselves overmuch with the hurly burly of geopolitics and, and yet here we are. Heineken has completed the sale for €1 of seven breweries and other assets in Russia to Arnest Group, a packaging and consumer goods business based in Stavropol. The deal, conceived of even as the tanks rolled in, will result in a loss of €300m, although Arnest will take care of Heineken’s 1,800 employees at least for the next three years. Unilever, in the meantime, is umming and ahing and generally carrying on like Hamlet regarding their exit, deciding for the moment to stay out of politics and stay in Russia so their 3,000 employees won’t be thrown to the tender mercies of a state takeover. However, new boss Hein Schumacher has promised to look at the issue with fresh eyes, giving hope to campaigners who are outraged at the £30m Unilever paid in corporate taxes last year to the Putin regime.

Comment: Two approaches to a difficult decision. Where is the line in the sand?

Good news, for a country that could really use some of that right about now, is that consumer price inflation (CPI) has eased further in July to +4.7% YoY compared to 5.4% in June, having peaked at 7.8% in July last year. It’s now well within the Reserve Bank’s 3-6% target band. The decline is in keeping with a global trend that’s seeing inflation retreating from its post-COVID and early-Ukraine highs, as supply chain bottlenecks ease and energy prices decline, although in our case we’re still struggling with the impacts of load shedding and a fluttery rand. The big upward pressures on July’s number came from food and non-alcoholic beverages, housing and utilities, and miscellaneous goods and services. This bodes well for the Reserve Bank’s September deliberation, in which all things being equal it will keep the interest rate where it is.

Comment: Sometimes, it can feel that the dear old SA economy exists within its own hellish bubble, wracked by forces no one else could hope to understand. There’s comfort in knowing that we are all part of the same big unruly global gemors.