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Shareholders of SPAR ("Shareholders") are advised that the Company has entered into negotiations, which if successfully concluded, may result in a material effect on the price of the Company’s securities. Or so we are told, in stark Courier, by SENS, mouthpiece of the JSE. And Shareholders are advised to exercise caution and blah blah blah. What can this mean? Other than a 3.4% jump in the share price as those punters, duly advised, exercised as much caution as they could find in their wallets, of course. So, an acquisition or merger of some sort? But who’s doing the buying? SPAR, or is someone buying SPAR? If we were SPAR, we would be looking at Choppies, that feisty Botswanan outfit who having sewn up the market in the motherland have launched an incursion across the border, too, and the acquisition of whom would have a very promising effect on footprint, turnover and the entrepreneurial appetites of prospective members.

Comment: But that’s just us.

Down south, Woolies is inching – millimetering, even – towards the conclusion of its David Jones deal, holding all of the ordinary shares through its Vela Holdings investment vehicle, and delisting from the Australian stock exchange imminent. Meanwhile – and we think you’re going to like this – Aussie punters are none too pleased with the deal. Davy Jones, you see, has just posted its strongest sales growth in four years this last quarter, and the funds Down Under believe that a turnaround was heaving into sight. On the downside, it appears that David Jone’s electronics business – just recently farmed out to a subsidiary called Dick Smith – is heading yet further south, and we’re not talking about New Zealand here.

Comment: But in the name of all that is twinkly and new, who buys their iPhone 6 from a place called Dick Smith? It’s like buying one’s lingerie, if one did, from a shop called Errol McKenzie.

Tiger Brands has been letting it be known somewhat that things are not all that on the home front, mentioning to CNBC in a special report that slow growth and other economic headwinds, as well as stiff retail competition in South Africa have led to a decline in consumer demand. Growth here is 2.3%, while Mozambique is steaming along at 8.3% and Chad (just to pull a name out of a hat. It could have just as easily been Doug, or Ned) is positively galloping at 10.8%. And of course Nigeria, which the Group has identified as its “key strategic market,” and they’re by no means the only outfit to do so, if the way Goodluck Jonathan was putting himself about in The Capital of the Free World this past week is anything to go by. Tiger, you will remember, recently bought 63.5% of Dangote Flour, and Mr Dangote himself appeared on a panel with Bill Clinton just three or four days ago.

Comment: Nigeria eh. Africa’s biggest economy, and all that. What? You didn’t know?

Or so we are led to believe by Astral Foods, in the news these how many months mainly for bellyaching about the cost of grain (high) and the prices of Brazilian imports (low). Now they say that everything is hunky-dory again, anticipating a rise in the profitability of their all-important poultry section thanks to the decline in the price of soya and maize, on which their avian charges are fond of feasting. They’re also well chuffed with the impositions by the dear old beardy DTI of anti-dumping penalties on some imports from the  EU. All of this has led them to target a 7% margin in their poultry division, up from 5% just a year ago, and has caused some analysts to celebrate them for their scale, their efficiency, and their general all-round good-thinginess.

Comment: We’ll be excited once they’ve figured out a way of feeding chickens to themselves while maintaining that 7% margin…

TransUnion are not a long-haul logistics business, as you might have imagined. Nor are they a lobby group representing the interests of the T bits of the LGBT community. They are in fact South Africa’s largest credit bureau, and they’ve got your number. No just kidding. Well they have, actually, you naughty, naughty reader, but what interests us here, in our mordant way, is the fact that consumer credit has deteriorated for the tenth consecutive quarter in June. And while delinquencies have stopped rising, this is mainly because the sadder, wiser banks have stopped lending as freely as they did in the days of wine, roses and Toyota Yarises so fleetingly past. Real household income growth remains zero, the interest rate is on the way up, as are the costs of basic goods and services, and all of this leads to a deeply unhappy consumer.

Comment: And an economy which appears to be losing its way.

One of the things you might expect as you venture north to where the infrastructure isn’t, is a store and warehouse fire which takes three days to put out. Or such was the experience of Shoprite, at their Palanca branch in Luanda, Angola last week.

That pack of thieves, liars and providers of an essential service, Eskom, have said that the electricity price is going only one way, and that way is up, to the tune of over 8%, with details to be ironed out by next April.