The Big Red One has come under the scrutiny of a bold new twitter handle and labour movement, #OutsourcingMustFall, which last week called for an immediate end to the hiring of labour through brokers at the Centurion DC, where one employee has been on the job since 2002, earning R13 an hour, and where 90% of the staff are not on the business’ actual books. Protestors from the organisation are demanding, inter alia, that Shoprite stop hiring through brokers, that all current brokered workers go onto Shoprite contracts and that staff receive a minimum wage of R10,000 per month. In happier Shoprite news, Whitey Basson attempted to pour oil on the merrily bubbling waters of national anxiety last week, averring at a business breakfast in Stellenbosch that he wasn’t losing sleep over the dear old South African economy, that he didn’t think Moody’s would downgrade us to junk and that while the dirty Gupta laundry should certainly be washed, it shouldn’t necessarily be aired in public.

Comment: And Whitey Basson is a man we’re inclined to take seriously.

Those Choppies interims then, to which you are entitled, Choppies being listed on not one but two stock exchanges – Gaborone and our very own JSE. Revenue was up 17% for the six months through December to R4.8bn, with gross profit up 11%. Sadly, though, HEPS, shareholders’ favoured method of measuring profitability, was down 18%, and it’s our fault. Well, the fault of depressed earnings in South Africa’s mining regions, anyway, where Choppies has, so to speak, staked its claim, and where the business lost R32.4m for the period. They remain sanguine however, believing that even the hardest of times must come to an end and that the purchase of 21 Jwayelani stores in the KZN and Eastern Cape regions will help things along in due course. They also announced that they’ve bought another 10 stores in Zambia and are eyeing a few more in Kenya, aiming to reach 200 in total by the end of 2016. 

Comment: A savvy and robust business which is in danger of losing its “plucky outsider” status.

Ex Unilever semper aliquid novi, as Cicero would have it. Or would have had it had there been a Unilever back then. Having gone big on green these past how many years, Le Grand Bleu is now betting it all on digital, or more specifically on data, which it maintains is set to revolutionise the way brands and businesses use customer insights. According to Senior Vice President for Consumer & Market Insights, Stan Sthanunathan, businesses need to use data instead of hoarding it, acting on what they have rather than mucking about with focus groups, and sharing the love where appropriate and presumably non-competitive. Accordingly, Unilever have teamed up with businesses like Coca-Cola, our friends Kantar, Nielsen, and The Market Research Society to develop an open data platform called Paragon which will combine their market research forces in addressing key global development and sustainability challenges.

Comment: Paragon will see you now. Right now.

A slow news week, so what better time for a deep dive into Tiger’s HR practices? Specifically as they relate to the recruitment of new CEOs. New boy Lawrence McDougall, see, was not an internal appointment, not he, having most recently served as executive vice-president and regional president for Eastern Europe, Middle East and Africa at a Tiger Brands rival, Mondelez International. He had come through the ranks at Cadbury, which he joined in 1982, ultimately serving as its South African MD before moving on up the food chain within the group until its takeover by Kraft and thence Mondelez. Tiger looked at 36 candidates for the position, including six staff members, one of them presumably acting CEO Noel Doyle, who is highly regarded and whom analysts hope will stick around past the interregnum.

Comment: Tight.

Slow news cycle, as we think we may have mentioned, and it’s at times like this that we ask ourselves idle questions like “Whither the EU?” and “How on earth does one rake up the cash to buy the world’s second largest brewer?” For this second question, at least, there is an answer. Turns out all you have to do, if you’re Anheuser-Busch InBev, is sell 13.25billion euros of notes, in six parts. This follows the sale in January of $46billion in bonds to raise cash for the purchase of SABMiller, and comes at a time of increased demand for investment-grade debt in Euros.

Comment: We don’t know if you watched The Big Short, but if you did, and understood what was going on, we’d appreciate a call. Also, if you have any clue about what “notes” are? We understand them to be chunks of a business’ credit which you can buy and for which you’ll receive regular interest payments.

It’s been a while since we had a look at the Reserve Bank’s leading indicator, and now we wish we hadn’t. The leading indicator, you see, is a composite device used in the forecasting of economic activity in the six months ahead, and it fell 4% year-on-year for the month of January, after declining 3.8% in December. This suggests, inter alia, dim growth prospects for the year. In other Reserve Bank news, Governor “The Guv’nor” Kganyago raised the interest rate by .25 basis points to 7% last week as the ongoing drought and wobbly rand put upward pressure on food inflation, even as the outlook for overall inflation improved from 6.8% to 6.6%.

Comment: It’s at times like this we take solace in the comforting words of Whitey Basson.

Activist shareholders are a shrill and unforgiving bunch generally. So when Nampak received kudos from one such Chris Logan for coming clean regarding their currency risks and diminished investment prospects in the embattled oil economies of Angola and Nigeria, it was high praise indeed.

Last month, Amazon announced that it would start delivering groceries – including fresh produce – to its customers, through a deal with UK retailer Morrisons. “Bring it on,” retorted Tesco CEO Dave Lewis (his words, not ours), who also rather gamely insisted that competition would only make the arguably embattled grocery giant stronger. Good luck with that, Dave.