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As we informed you last week, Massmart’s results were not all that, with sales up 10% but profit declining to the mournful tune of 5.7%. “How can this be?” you cry. “What was once so young, so vital…” In a word, Game, and durable goods generally. Massmart are blaming the mining strikes, but whatever the cause, SA’s lower-to-middle income punters are battling right now, and sales have slowed on anything that can’t be eaten or drunk all across the industry. Massmart, and Game in particular, is unusually reliant on durable goods to earn its crust, and comparable sales over there grew only 0.4% for the FY, compared with a Group-wide total of 7.1%. In other news from the Massmart results, the Men in Black are investing more heavily in their property portfolio, upping their stake by 11.4% YOY and buying some significant plots, including, wait for it, their own head office premises in Sunninghill.

Comment: The fixing of Game will, we predict, be one of the more interesting stories of the next couple of years.

Pick n Pay have sunk a further stake into the potentially rich Zimbabwean soil, and this one’s a biggie: A R48million megastore a few clicks east of Harare’s bustling downtown, under the TM Supermarkets umbrella, of which PnP own 49%. Although it’s not an actual umbrella, but rather a fine, if cautious, vehicle to drive their growth in that occasionally promising economy. The store will trade under the strangely ominous-sounding Jaggers Masasa brand and will join TM’s 53 other stores as flagship, leading the battle against competitors SPAR and OK Zimbabwe. Previously a Metcash, the store occupies premises owned by Old Mutual. And more’s to come – new Pick n Pay branded outlets in both Harare and Gweru in the near future.

Comment: Now is a brave time to invest, in the midst of a deflationary cycle where retail margins have fallen to below 5% from their high in recent years of 20%. Still, worth a flutter.

Pick n Pay continue to wax martial in their effort to claw back market share from the compo, this time with the launch of Brand Match, in which they compare the prices of 1,000 items across all the major chains. And what do you get if they find a better price? Pick n Pay vouchers to make up the difference, to be spent at Pick n Pay, as it happens. What we in the industry call a win-win. Here’s how it works: when Mrs Punter buys 10 or more items from the list, a brand match alert is triggered, and the savings (or otherwise) will be revealed on the till slip. The basket which was developed with Nielsen, will be independently monitored by two research businesses. As it stands, Standard Bank have found recently that PnP are currently pricing 5% below Checkers and 6.7% below Game.

Comment: Bold work from Mr Brasher. The bulldog spirit and all that.

Mark Lamberti took the wheel in March as CEO of the lumbering 18-wheeler that is IMPERIAL Logistics, and at time of going to press has not yet managed to coax any additional kph’s out of the beast. Nor yet has he put it in a ditch, so that’s good. But while revenue rose 12% and exceeded R100billion for the first time, operating profit was up just 2% to R6.2billion. We’re going to let IMPERIAL take it from here, now, just for the sheer, densely occluded joy of the obfuscative syllables they deploy: “These results reflect progress with IMPERIAL's previously espoused intent to decouple the Group's performance from the cyclicality of South African new vehicle sales, by investing in, or developing, less correlated businesses where our experience and expertise enables us to provide value in new markets and geographies.”

Comment: Better than which we could not have put it ourselves…

Huge growth for the business formerly named after attractive meteorological phenomena and which may once have had an interest in the poultry trade. RCL Foods, as we must now call them, saw sales rise 95.1% to R19,7billion, on the back of their acquisitions last year of Foodcorp and TSB Sugar. Unfortunately, Foodcorp traded below expectations this past year, victim to the same tough conditions and constrained consumer spending as the rest of the industry. This led to a headline loss from continuing operations of R332.6million for the year after last year’s modest profit of R18.8million. However, the ebullient Mr Dally seems confident that RCL now has a platform for handsome growth as a food business, with a portfolio of brands with substantial equity to be leveraged.

Comment: As one of SA’s pioneers in the value-added game, RCL does indeed seem poised for interesting things.

GDP growth soared by 0.6% in the second quarter of this annus horribilis we have no choice but to call 2014, after losing 0.6% in the first three months. Big contributors to this rampancy were “general government services” (It’s all those new cops in parliament. Ed) and the “transport, storage, and communication industry” which apparently makes awkward bedfellows of diesel mechanics and creative directors. Mining, predictably, was down, as was manufacturing, and the malaise has spread to other sectors too. It seems unlikely, say economists, that the remaining two quarters will remedy the situation, which means we are looking at the sixth year in a row of growth under 2%, in an economy which, it is generally held, requires 7% for meaningful job creation.

Comment: A pitiful shame which speaks volumes about apathy at the top, fatalism at the bottom and despair in between.

The Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) has dismissed Tiger Brands’ complaint against Pioneer Foods for claiming that Weetbix is “The number one cereal in South Africa”. The ASA, you see, hold that there is nothing in the offending ad which suggests Weetbix hold dominant value rather than mere volume market share, which they apparently do, when compared with Kelloggs’ entire stable of breakfast goodies.

After the handsome set of numbers we reported on last week, The Dapper One is positioning itself more aggressively vis-à-vis the competition, ramping up the bargains and promotions and increasing the number of SKUs in order to convert all of those nit-picky basket shoppers into full-blooded trolley pushers.