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Amazon has finally announced that it will be open for business on these shores in 2024. “We look forward to launching amazon.co.za in South Africa, providing local sellers, brand owners and entrepreneurs – small and large – the opportunity to grow their business with Amazon, and delivering great value and a convenient shopping experience for customers across South Africa,” says Amazon GM for sub-Saharan Africa Robert Koen. Amazon will be going up against local giant Takealot, which has admittedly not yet managed to achieve profitability in ten years of operation, taking a R300m hit last year, as well as tough local conditions, including a patchy electricity grid, a stressed consumer environment and the Competition Commission on its back. Amazon will sell all its own brands, and private labels, when it eventually launches, with as much as 60% of what it sells coming from other merchants.

Comment: For those wishing to dip a toe in the water, our friends at BizCommunity have run this handy guide for suppliers wishing to list their products with the retail behemoth. It makes for a daunting read.

You will be relieved to know that SPAR shareholders have finally approved the payment of fees to its non-executive directors – a worthy bunch who have had an extremely difficult year, but whose part in the tough decision to sell the underperforming Polish assets was rewarded with an +11% jump in the share price. Next, enjoy the new SPAR2U app and Rewards programme escalators at OR Tambo brought to you by Motion Icon. Finally: 7 million girls from disadvantaged backgrounds in South Africa lose as much as 25% of their learning opportunities through not being able to afford feminine hygiene products. SPAR is helping assist period poverty by subsidising their private label Petal sanitary pads, tampons and pantyliners, then encouraging shoppers to buy and donate them. Various women’s organisations have come onboard; the latest is Running4Pads which takes advantage of the SPAR Women’s Challenge to achieve its objective: at this year’s Cape Town leg of the popular event 18,480 packs were donated.

Comment: SPAR have for years run innovative and influential programmes in support of South African women and girls. This one is another winner.

Makro has obtained exclusive rights for the distribution of MrBeast’s Feastables, a range of chocolate bars, retailing for R49.95 a pop and brought to market by the eponymous and viral YouTube philanthropist, who has over 200 million subscribers, many of them young South Africans. Next, Pick n Pay has donated R500,000 to the Chris Burger Petro Jackson Players’ Fund, a foundation that assists those who have sustained head, neck or spinal cord injuries while playing rugby. The fund currently supports 87 players on an ongoing basis or until they make a full recovery. Proceeds came from the sale of Pick n Pay’s limited-edition, reusable Springbok supporter shopping bags, which the retailer launched ahead of the Rugby World Cup. And finally, a snapshot of the achievements of Christo Wiese, who sold a big chunk of his Shoprite stock last week, although he’s still the second-biggest shareholder, with 60 million shares still in play: when he invested in the business through Pepco in 1979, Shoprite didn’t have 20 stores running. Now it has 3,320 and counting in 10 countries and employs over 153,000 staff.

Comment: A successful career, by any measure.

In Hungary, SPAR’s Regional Treasure initiative brings small producers and consumers closer together by fostering local sourcing of high-quality products from family enterprises, resulting in shorter supply chains, fewer environmental pressures, and jobs in smaller regions, with more than 600 people currently employed through partnerships with local business. “Szép!” as the locals themselves would doubtless remark. Next, the US grocery industry is expected to achieve growth in 2023, projected at a total – albeit moderate – rise of +5.6% to $1.5tn this year, according to data outfit Coresight Research. Interestingly, food-at-home held a 47% share of total US food spending in 2022, but Coresight projects this will decline to 44.8% in 2027. Finally, interesting stats from Tesco who report that 3.3 million customers purchased at least 10% more healthy products in 2022, amid changes to product placement and promotions. Their Better Baskets campaign drove a +12% volume increase in healthier lines, and over 500,000 more shoppers’ baskets are now made up of at least 65% healthy products.

Comment: The move to healthier options has been a megatrend long observed by Trade Intelligence. Everywhere, it seems, it’s having a real impact on the bottom line.

Whip out the reading glasses, this one’s a little tricky. Seems that Unilever, while owning the Dermalogica brand globally, does not own it locally. Until now that is, sort of. It has entered into a JV with CAVI Brands – the shareholder of the existing South African Dermalogica business, also known as The Dermal Institute of South Africa (Pty) Ltd (Dermalogica SA) – in a transaction approved last month by the Competition Commission. The existing leadership will remain in place. The JV, also to be known as Dermalogica SA, will “harness the collective strengths of both organisations to deliver product and education solutions in the skincare industry that empower businesses and individual owners to thrive in the fast-evolving skincare environment, with strong investment in education to grow the industry in South Africa”. No word on the cost of the transaction or the ownership of equity; Unilever, as you know, is not locally listed.

Comment: Dermalogica has always been cannily marketed as a brand of experts and even medical professionals. This partnership seems set to deepen that perception.

Tiger Brands shareholders like what they’re hearing about incoming CEO Tjaart Kruger, with the share price jumping +12% after last week’s announcement that incumbent Noel Doyle will be stepping down. Kruger was formerly CEO of Premier Foods and MD of Tiger Brands’ pharmaceuticals and grains divisions from 2001 to 2007. Not unrelated, Tiger also issued a profit warning, letting it be known that HEPS for FY2023 are likely to range from 5% lower to 2% higher than last year. Moving on, Nestlé global has missed its 9-month projections, with real internal growth (or a measure of sales volumes) falling -0.6%, and sales prices up +8.4%, or 0.2 percentage points lower than predicted. And in really interesting news, the business will be closing its Irish Nestlé’s Askeaton factory and R&D facility, which produces formula for the Chinese market, as China’s birth rate continues to decline; it’s currently at 1.09 per woman. Finally, Coca-Cola International has announced a collab with Pernod-Ricard for the launch of Absolut & Sprite in early 2024.

Comment: It’s a pity that the opportunity for a local collab was missed, as Klipdrift partnered with an unnamed ‘cola’ almost two decades ago already.

Stats SA’s inflation report for September reveals that CPI rose to 5.4%, with food and non-alcoholic beverages contributing 1.4 percentage points to this increase. Fair enough, but where are the big food increases coming from? Let’s ask the National Agricultural Marketing Council (NAMC). In the food basket cost report they released last week, they noted that bananas were up +11%, rice by +4.3%, tea up +3%, potatoes up +1.2% and maize meal up +1% – so not terrible news on some of the staples. And some fairly critical foodstuffs actually went down in price: tomatoes dropped -7.4% per kilo, with beef mince down -3.2%, cabbage down -2.9% and dried beans down -1.1%. But don’t become complacent, they warn: food inflation is likely to trend upward in coming months, with El Niño exerting upward pressure on the sugar price, war in Ukraine driving up the price of oil, and bird flu inflating the price of both chicken and eggs locally.

Comment: Either way, there’s little wiggle room for SA’s stressed consumers.