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Despite the recent contre-temps, if that’s the word, with government and stock exchanges and unions and whatnot in Zambia, The Big Red One are going ahead and opening more stores in that copper-rich cliché country anyway. This according to Shoprite Zambia’s FGM, a man with the non-Zambian name of Charles Bota. Coming up soon: a new store in Kafubu Mall, Ndola, then Twin Palm Mall in Lusaka, then a mini-Shoprite, which sounds intriguing, in Kapiri Mposhi in September or October, then a potential store in Chililabombwe, a second one in Mongu and perhaps another in Kitwe’s new Mukuba Mall, currently under construction. All of these will bring the total in-country to a not-insubstantial 26, which is what we in the industry call footprint.

Comment: And how about those wonderful names? They practically dance off the old Remington.

More good news from the Big Blue, who last week turned in what passes for a tidy set of results in these straitened times. This time it’s their online food business, where sales are up 27% in the past year, with 2,000 deliveries per week. These numbers outperform those gathered by World Wide Worx, which recorded a 7% increase in online grocery shopping for a similar period. Other news of note to the technically-inclined PnP punter, is their Mobile Money service, launched in 2010, a means of transferring cash securely to your folks back home as well as shopping wallet-free in PnP and Boxer stores. With their deepening partnership with MTN, The Big Blue will now be able to offer a range of new Mobile Money services, including higher-value transactions and daily cash withdrawals, a couple of card options and access to Smart Shopper benefits.

Comment: Impressive, the way that PnP have sailed apparently unperturbed above two solid years of dickering criticism from the pundits and are showing every evidence of emerging on the other side stronger, more innovative and indeed more profitable.

Apropos of not too much at all, ANC mouthpiece The New Age believes that with the exit of Grant Pattison from the corner office and Mark Lamberti from the Chair, Massmart is poised for a new age (ahem) of African adventurism “untainted by the past,” having lagged the likes of Shoprite on that opportunity-laden continent for some time although in fairness outstripping the rest. Be this as it may, markets and commentators alike have noted with approval the ascension of Guy Hayward into the top spot and Kuseni Dlamini into the chair. Hayward (who might henceforth be known in these pages as The Gentleman Scholar, or perhaps even The Honourable Schoolboy, we’ll see), has a passel of financial and retail experience under his belt (a size 32 we are reliably told), having held down responsible jobs at Malbak and CNA Gallo and at Goldman Sachs in London before joining The Men in Black as group financial executive in 2000. He has, we have observed, a polite but steely way with the analysts, and that goes a long way.

Comment: Sometimes you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone. And sometimes, you don’t know what else you have got till the original thing went. Or something.

When it comes to the true leviathans which ply the inviting waters of this great ocean of industry and commerce we call home, we report on the quarterly rather than merely the annual or even the interim results. That’s just how we roll. So, Nestlé then, more gargantuan than which you cannot get: sales up just 4.2% for the first quarter, the worst for this auspicious period since the turbid days of 2009, with revenue on the European heartland actually down by 0.8% in the face of deflation and a slow recovery from the economic woes which recently plagued that small and crowded territory, as well as the rude good health of the Swiss franc, by which Nestlé quite understandably measures its success. Developing markets are another story, however, growing a handsome 8.5% for the period.

Comment: So there you have it, until next quarter.

Yes you read our inappropriately cheeky header correctly. The world’s global banana crop is under threat, as the TR4 strain of Panama disease, currently ravaging tens of thousands of hectares in south-east Asia, finds toehold in Jordan and more worryingly for us, in Mozambique. If we’re to avoid the worst ravages, says plant pathologist Altus Viljoen, we need a quarantine at all our ports, access control on all banana plantations and disinfectant baths at their gates, like we did during the foot and mouth outbreaks of the recent past. Panama is a fungal disease of the roots. It devastated the industry in the 1950s and promoted a move to more resistant cultivars. The new strains of the disease naturally threaten these very cultivars, notably the popular Cavendish.

Comment: A global industry worth $5billion, and a useful nutritional fallback under devastating threat.

The bearded dodderers over at StatsSA will have you know that retail sales increased just 2.2% in the month of February, down from their 6.4% January spike which still has the experts scratching their grizzled pates. And guess what? The economists got it wrong, again, predicting that it would be somewhere in the order of 2.9% and 3.7%. The main contributor to the largesse, such that it is, was retailers in textiles, clothing, footwear and leather goods. The decline, say these economists, may be attributed to slowing growth in real disposable income, depressed consumer confidence, a slowdown in credit extension to the private sector and higher interest rates, which is what they’ve been saying for how many months now?

Comment: Not, of course, that this doesn’t make it true.

Le Grand Bleu, recently in these pages for a rather dramatic Competition Commission raid (battering rams and flak jackets we are told, in contrasting rather than collusively matching tones), is launching a new global campaign in the form of a short film ‘Dove: Patches’, which highlights how the right state of mind can unlock a powerful feeling of beauty that lives inside all women, except our Standard 4 teacher, Miss Konigkramer.

We aren’t prone to do this, but sometimes a subject deserves a longer-form approach than we are able to take in these columns. So if, like us, you are concerned about the effect that formal retail has on the smaller operator, have a look here. Among the disturbing facts you will learn there is that Soweto has lost an estimated 30% of its informal retailers since 2005.