Woolies kicked off the results season last week, and are looking a little like the Stormers, classy and promising, and able, perhaps, to score in Aus. Sales were up 9.3% in the first half to R11.5billion, and headline earnings per share were up a pleasing 13.8% to 80.1c. They also report “market share gains” in both food and clothing, claiming 8.4% of the food market although perhaps instructed by the Shoprite/Pick n Pay spat last year not specifying whence the gain might be coming. Woolies say they’re making progress both with their customers’ perceptions of affordability, and with an improvement in the availability issue which dogged the dapper one a couple of years back. Excluding the sale of the debtor’s book to Absa in ’08, profits were up a presentable 10.4% to R955million before tax, with gross margin improved mainly through better procurement and lower level of promotional activity.

Comment: A spruce showing from the retailer which perhaps lost most over the recession, yet weathered it with characteristic savoir-faire.

Boxer is one of several retailers and cash n carrys to benefit from the patronage of the eBuhleni faction of the Nazareth Baptist Church, also known as Shembe. The faction has 5 million members and has lined up a number of businesses which offer discounts ranging from 5-15% to members, who in these difficult times sorely need them. The programme works through membership cards which double as loyalty cards, with – and here’s the cunning part – a percentage of the discount going back to the church. A win-win-win, in other words. Other businesses involved include McCarthy Toyota KZN, Build-It and Browns Cash n Carry.

Comment: A business model which could have been designed in Rome. Nice one.

Online shopping in South Africa, she’s not so big. Last year, etailers, as they are catchily known, raked in a mere R1.6billion, or just 1% of all available wonga. Why should this be? Clicks believe it’s all down to the heinous cost of broadband in this country and the relatively limited base of wired consumers, while Massmart believe the market simply doesn’t want online shopping to the same extent that more developed markets do. In China, for example, online now represent 1.9% of all retail sales while in the US it spiked to 4% over the festive season last year. Arthur Goldstuck, SA’s very own web guru (and you know he’s a guru because his shirts never have collars) believes that it’s mainly a case of retailers not knowing what to do online, and making their sites frustrating to use.

Comment: Stokvels. Now there’s a channel.

Distell’s interim results for the six months to December reveal that South Africa’s thirst for sweet, bubbly alcoholic beverages remains unslaked, and that we are splashing out more and more on ciders, coolers, mixes and sundry colourful drinks than ever before – although wine and spirits are not holding up their end of the bar. Revenue grew 9.3% for the period, to R6.6billion, while operating profit was up just 1.9% to R949million. Domestic volumes were up 5.8%, with international volumes up 13.8%. Distell sell Amarula Cream internationally, Nederburg and Savanna to the Poms and the Dutch, and Hunter’s all over Africa.

Comment: Counter-intuitively, it seems people even drink less during a recession.

Last year, Clover’s BEE deal with Hosken Consolidated Investments (HCI) was under a cloud of sorts because there was some lack of clarity on how Clover would be recapitalised, with HCI at one stage professing doubt as to whether this would ever be achieved. Problem solved. Clover sold its shares in Danone back to Danone for a whopping R1.1billion – R0.4billion or thereabouts more than was needed to reduce the debt burden to levels acceptable to all parties, and R0.5billion more than the stake was recently valued at. While Clover has lost a significant share of the dairy products’ market through the deal, Clover assures that there is exciting stuff in the pipeline.

Comment: Much of it, one assumes, fresh, white and frothy.

While golf estates may have gone off the boil somewhat, sugar is booming, which is excellent news for Tongaat Hulett who in recent years have had a way of turning the latter into the former as it were, and both into good, hard cash. Tongaat, you see, are expecting their profits for the year to December to climb a staggering 40%, due to favourable weather conditions (which makes a change, doesn’t it?) and an exceptionally high sugar price on the back of last year’s poor crop. Mozambique is also a big winner for the group, where operations are ramping up and profits rose 74% to R134million in the 6 months to June ’09.

Comment: The sugar sector is surging right now, owning both the market and the means of production, with all sorts of interesting prospect down the line, like the production of ethanol.

How was that budget speech, eh? When Trevor chirped in with the comment? And when the PowerPoint wouldn’t work? And when Gill Marcus’s little dog ran in with the Simpsons T-shirt that said... Ok, we didn’t watch it, either. But word in the marbled halls of our shopping centres is that it’s a good budget for retailers – tax breaks around every corner to the tune of R6.5million, widened brackets for social grants and wage subsidies for the young, who will as we know, promptly go out and spend them on eighties-style zebra-print belts, lifestyle sodas and airtime. This according to BOE, who, you will be pleased to know, believe that food retailers will be among the prime beneficiaries of all of this largesse.

Comment: A budget excoriated in some quarters as a monstrous failure and hailed in others as an even handed disposal of the available funds, but either way which may indeed contribute to a modest recovery in our industry.

The word from December is in at last, and retail sales were indeed down – by 3.7% as it happens, and not by the 7.8% that the hollow-eyed teeth-suckers at Nedbank were predicting in their gloomier moments. This gives an average decline of 5.3% for the very shaky quarter and 4.9% for the full, nervous year. General dealers showed a modest decline of 1.2% for the quarter, and specialised food and tobacco-wallahs an even more modest decline of 0.3%. Retailers in pharmaceutical and medical goods, cosmetics and toiletries were positively buoyant at 0.1% in the black, party squeakers all round!

Comment: We have it on excellent authority that the retailers of giant white plastic robots did particularly well over the period.

The farmers are complaining. You know, just generally. As usual. In fact, what they are currently, and specifically, complaining about is the huge mountain of wheat they themselves harvested when the prices skyrocketed at the height of the food shortage in ’08, and which they’re now battling to unload, the better to make the payments on all the E-classes they took delivery of back then. Admittedly, they’re also competing with the huge mountain of wheat planted by farmers in the Ukraine and Argentina, when their farmers bought all the E-classes and needed to grow wheat to pay them off. Now, naturally, they’re saying it’s impossible to grow wheat at the prices they’re being offered, hence the great wheat shortage, we’ll bet, of 2012.

Comment: For Pete’s sake someone start a bread cartel to inflate the prices and shut the farmers up.