In further evidence that businesses are at last coming to their senses, Woolies’ top management will not be receiving their Christmas bonuses this year, as the business did not perform well enough to justify this. This means that the top execs will have a mere R58.5m to splash out on Lego and brandy butter come December 24, compared with the R94m they dropped in Mauritius and Plett last year. There’s some disagreement about why Woolies has done so dismally Down Under this twelvemonth past. Some analysts believe that the Dapper One failed to learn the lesson from its acquisition of Country Road, which took the better part of a decade to turn around, and that they have adopted a cookie-cutter approach, attempting to turn South African success into Aussie dollars. Woolies itself disagrees, saying that they’ve gone into Aussie retail with all due humility, and that the fault lies with the shaky retail infrastructure of the David Jones business. 

Comment: Whatever. Humility and even a modicum of sacrifice among retail execs certainly can be a bracing though.

We are told on exceptionally good authority that SPAR are in the process of buying pharmacy wholesaler business, S Buys. This is big news: SPAR are going great, and indeed green, guns into pharmacy, growing their portfolio from zero to 82 stores in just five or so years, with 36 more in the pipeline. S Buys is a full-line pharmaceutical wholesaler that services pharmacies, hospitals and doctors as well as the State and NGOs, and in the context of SPAR will be supplying the owner-run stores the business is adding furiously to the family – with an end goal of as many as 400, enough, certainly, to give pause to Clicks and Dis-Chem, and to arouse the envy of Pick n Pay, whose experiment in pharmacy has not been that successful, and Shoprite, which also hasn’t made the splash one might have expected. 

Comment: Why would SPAR be any different? Well, Clicks has done pretty well by owning its own wholesaler, for starters, and Shoprite owns one too. And the small-business model that works so well for SPAR probably finds a certain resonance with pharmacists, who are by and large a fiercely independent bunch.

Big news from the manufacturing sector this week is that Phil Roux has stepped down as CEO of Pioneer after a trading update revealed that turnover was down 4% for the 10 months through July. Not that the two are necessarily connected – most analysts agree that Roux has done a bang-up job in the transformation of the business, save only in one particular: he hadn’t managed to pull off a major offshore acquisition of the sort which are all the rage these days. His initial success is evinced, if that’s the word, by the fortunes of the share price: at R77 when he took over in 2013, with a brief of focusing on the best sellers and cutting costs, it went over R200 in October 2015, but has since slumped. It dropped a further 7% on the news of his retirement last week, to a 12-month low of R118. Roux is succeeded by Tertius Carstens, business executive for Pioneer’s essential foods division, the Group’s most profitable division. 

Comment: (Something about changing horses in mid-race here – Ed)

D2C – just another late-80s rap crew out of Brooklyn? No, as it happens: it’s the latest thing among suppliers wishing to cut out the middle man – or in the unlikely event of a retail CEO being one, middle woman – and going Direct 2 Consumer. The “2” here should in fact read “to”. Unilever, you will recall, recently acquired the fabulously successful Dollar Shave Club, a D2C business built on the novel premise that you shouldn’t have to take out a second bond just to remove the hair from your face or indeed your legs. Now they’re trying something else: in a partnership with delivery service (and unpronounceable name) Quiqup in the UK, where as far as we can tell, you pick out a recipe from the Hellmann’s mayo recipe book, or its online equivalent, then get all the goods delivered 2 your door in 1 hour. Needless to say, the endeavour is targeted at millennials, whatever they are. 

Comment: So no, it’s not going to put Tesco out of business. Yet.

Finally, some good news out of the poultry sector, where our old friends RCL FOODS report that the business has stabilised on the implementation of its strategy of diversification into other core food categories, such as sugar, milled grains and animal feed. Admittedly, the actual financials tell a story of modest success, with overall revenue declining 0.3% to R24.95bn, although normalised HEPS were up 7.5%. And cost-cutting in the chicken business has also paid off, with second-half earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortisation (Ebitda) of R94.9m, compared with the normalised Ebitda of R14.1m for the first six months of the year. Let’s hear it from the big guy: “We remain confident in our strategy, and we are making steady progress towards our goal of a diversified portfolio, with a stronger emphasis on higher-margin, added-value categories and reduced exposure to commodity product lines,” says CEO Miles Dally. 

Comment: Excellent work there, Mr D and team, in an embattled sector and a tough economic ambit.

Well thank the gods of the harvest and the counting-house for that! The Beloved Country has exited a brief but nasty recession with news from the hoary sages at StatsSA that we posted GDP growth of 2.5% for the second quarter, having slowed by 0.3% and 0.7% for the previous two quarters. Big contributors were agriculture, storming out of the drought at 33.6% growth, and mining, at 3.9%. Manufacturing was up a more modest 1.5%, and trade only 0.6%, but still. Household spending was up a solid 4.7%, in the face of depressed consumer confidence. And in other StatsSA-related news, the hoariest of the sages Pali Lehohla is stepping down as Statistician-General, a position he has held for 32.1174% longer than previous incumbents. 

Comment: Good news re GDP, let’s see if we can keep it going.

Boxer Stores is relaunching the popular money transfer service to its customers, allowing transfers of up to R5,000 daily, with a monthly limit of R15,000, using a Boxer Money Services or Pick n Pay Smart Shopper card, from any Boxer or Pick n Pay till point, with a code applicable only to the transfer in question.

Last week we somewhat offhandedly let it drop that ex-Bidvest chair Brian Joffe was buying Inhle Beverages through his newly-listed vehicle Long4Life... wait a minute, ex-CEO? What the freaking heck? Yup. The architect and builder of Bidvest, Mr Brian Joffe is out, pursuing greener pastures, with an oddly terse farewell from the company he is leaving behind. Watch this space for the sprightly septuagenarian’s next empire.