This might be the end of the beginning of Pick n Pay's turnaround. While turnover was up a relatively modest 7.5% to R30.1bn for the six months to September 1, reflecting the consumer slowdown as experienced by all retailers, net profit approached 14%, with gross margin up 0.4% to 18.1% of turnover. This all seems to indicate that Mr Brasher's recovery plan has come into play, and that supply-chain investments are finally kicking in to help control costs. There have been other improvements: the SmartShoppper loyalty programme has become entrenched and continues to evolve in line with shopper preferences (kiosks out, apps in), and on-shelf availability (thank you Longmeadow) is up by 3%, reflecting the efficient new broom sweeping the DC floors. On the downside, market share remains static and trading expenses, up 9.4%, are growing faster than sales as store openings accelerate. But in an excitingly edgy development, online sales are up 24%. And the punters have given the Big Blue a pat on the head too, with the share price up 7.59%, for all this good news.

Comment: Great stuff, PnP. We thought we'd lost you for a minute there, big guy.

"Massmart knows very little about clothing,” says Massmart’s Mr Pattison, who is indeed generally solidly turned out in a dependable black suit. But all this could change, he says, with help from partners Walmart (see also “The People of Walmart”) and Asda. With their help in effectively identifying a compelling clothing proposition from a pre-selected range, “we could roll out a very respectable clothing store," he says. To prove this, they’ve established, if that’s the word, three pop-up shops, at Cresta in Joburg, Galleria in ‘Toti and at CapeGate in Cape Town, under Asda’s George brand. George sells duds which are positioned somewhere between Mr P and Woolies on the quality/cost spectrum, and the pop-up stores are designed to test the waters and start the laborious process of building something the fashion people call a ‘brand’.

Comment: The tentacular growth of the Walmart/Massmart empire continues, interdicts and exclusivity clauses notwithstanding…

More results, this time from Clicks, who grew turnover 13.6% to R17.5bn for the year to August 31, with net income up a more modest 9% to R751.2m on sales which grew 8.6%.  Generic medicines have been a winner for Clicks, with sales up 16.1% and now accounting for over 40% of sales. Another dependable performer was the venerable yet still fresh ClubCard programme, which now has 4.1million members, accounting for 76% of sales and spending on average twice as much as non-members. CDs, hmm, less so, with sales up just 5.9% as online music sales grow at 7.8% annually and accessories, like portable speakers, the big winner there, while Body Shop continued fragrant, with sales up 11.3%. And UPD, sjoe! Sales increased 22.8%, and they now own 26.7% of the wholesale drug market.

Comment: As we have repeatedly mentioned, we have a great new business model for Musica we’d like to run by you. Give us a call anytime.

Hot on the heels of the massive warehousing deal with Kraft Foods, the clever chaps (and indeed chapettes) at Imperial Logistics have landed a whacking great contract with Tiger Brands. The Striped One has asked Imperial to handle all primary transport activities, including full load finished goods movement from factory to warehouse, DC or direct customer deliveries for their Consumer and Grains Divisions, and if you like this sort of detail, to take responsibility for all the activities associated with the planning, execution, management, reporting and IT of primary freight logistics management services. But if you’re an old-school logistics oke, it means 46,000 loads per year. Part of the drawcard for Tiger was Imperial’s “proven capabilities in network (IT) integration and its national order visibility linking capacities.”

Comment: Time to dust off those shares we suggested you snaffle up five years ago … oh, we didn’t? Silly us.

Beset on all sides by Mother Grundies, the ASA and urban sophisticates tooting on e-cigarettes, their sharp features lit by the lurid blue glow from the LED on the tip, the tobacco industry must now face one more hurdle on the path to final extinction. This time, it’s draft regulations which are aimed at limiting the display of tobacco products in stores, confining them to an area not exceeding 4m² in the case of a specialist tobacconist, or 1m² in the case of wholesalers and retailers, but only those retail outlets which are bigger than 15m2. In addition, only one pack of each variant would be permitted to show itself. The industry claims that it has not been consulted on the move, and is concerned that it will force thousands of outlets to make structural changes to their trading space.

Comment: Omelette, eggs, as far as the DoH is concerned. As far as the fiscus goes, however, Tobacco is worth around R12bn per year, a sum not to be sniffed, sneezed or indeed coughed at, if you get our drift.

An interesting one for you here. President Zuma has announced that this year, the government would be making R2bn available to put as many as one million hectares of unused land under cultivation for maize, beans and staples, in order to increase the availability and access to locally produced food products and create opportunities for small, medium and micro enterprise developments at local level under the Fetsa Tlala (End Hunger) initiative. This is a follow-on from an existing Land Affairs initiative which has already seen 135,000ha put under production. According to the Prez, the programme is also aimed at bringing equity to the sector. Quoth he: “Some 36,000 large-scale farmers control over 86million hectares of farmland, while 1.4million black farmers have access to about 14million hectares.” He does emphasise, however, that this Fetsa Tlala is not a replacement for land reform.

Comment: This is social (and indeed commercial) engineering on a grand scale, but perhaps justified and even promising. However, it does seem to put government in indirect competition with the commercial farming sector, which is perhaps unprecedented.

This month, 175 years ago in the town of Heilbronn in Germany, founder C. H. Knorr started experimenting with food-drying techniques and the rest, they say, is history. History which includes accompanying Roald Amundsen to the South Pole in 1912, inventing soup cubes and selling the family silver to Unilever in 2000.

SA’s fisherfolk are up in arms over the admission by a couple of our retailers that they are sourcing Yellowtail farmed in Korea and Japan, and Snoek from New Zealand and Namibia at better rates than they are able to get locally. Retailers like FVC and Pick n Pay have cited full-Sassi compliance and better pricing as drawcards for the imported fish.