For yonks now, Christo Wiese has exercised control over the Shoprite Group by wielding his special deferred shares, which carry more votes than ordinary shares. Now he’s agreed to give them up in exchange for the common-or-garden variety, relaxing his grip on the business. Shoprite have offered to buy back his shares in a deal worth some R3bn, which would include 20 million new ordinary shares. If approved (by ordinary shareholders nogal) this would reduce the voting interest of his Titan Group from 42.3% to 17.8%, but increase its economic interest from 14.8% to 17.8%, in case you were worried about where his next bottle of Dom Perignon was coming from. In other news of the Big Red One, an embarrassingly scant 26.98% of ordinary shareholders voted in favour of the Group’s remuneration policy last October, apparently.

Comment: With Oom Christo no longer front and centre, that’s a number that will no doubt be giving Directors pause.

More on that growth in private label, which so intrigued us when we reported on the Click results last week. No-name brands, as they used to be called, have played a significant role in the construction of the bulwark Clicks have built. Own brands now make up 29.7% of Clicks’ front shop offering, and 6.2% of pharmacy sales. Its famous three-for-two promo has also had a role to play, as has the unassailable might of its venerable ClubCard loyalty programme. But shed no tears for Dis-Chem; they’re doing OK. Rather than Clicks taking market share away from them, the two combined have been busily chipping away at the rest of the retailers, and punters are still apparently shopping between the two.

Comment: While we celebrate the ongoing success of Clicks, we enjoy the thrill of a strong contest between these titans of health and beauty.

While we wait in anticipation for the arrival of the Pick n Pay results, a story that will leave Woolies relieved that its turn in the fish-shooting barrel appears to be over: Flamco owner, Rajan Naicker, has petitioned the KZN High Court to sanction Pick n Pay for using a trademark similar to his Braaitime brand, which is applied to his range of charcoal, briquettes and firelighters. The Big Blue had applied the name Braai Time to their own range of 30 similar products. Naicker argues that since he’s a long-time supplier to the retailer, they must have known better. PnP for their part have taken the name off the next batch of products.

Comment: For a period in our inglorious past we worked as a copywriter in the advertising industry. And trust us when we say, it doesn’t take a genius, or even two, to come up with a name like that. We call minor coincidence and suggest everyone wind their necks back in. And in fact – well played Pick n Pay.

Turns out that Dove’s Real Beauty campaign of several years ago was no flash in the pan. A new study by the brand shows that 71% of South African women don’t feel represented in media and advertising, and 75% want brands to start paying attention to the photography they use, in order to achieve a more diverse representation of female beauty. "In many ways the sector remains a bastion of misogyny, where male brand managers and their agency counterparts have little idea of modern gender representation,” says a leading local creative director. Preach! And in other news of Unilever advertising, the business in the UK has saved €300m over the past two years in advertising and marketing expenses after it rationalised its spend by reducing the number of agencies it was working with and bringing some functions in-house. It has reinvested this sum in point-of-sale advertising and media that actually works.

Comment: Hard numbers to argue with, but not great for the smaller agencies for whom Unilever work was their life blood.

Zeder Investments, the agri-business holding company which owns 27% of Pioneer Foods, is waxing bullish about further acquisitions in the food sector, surprisingly. Surprisingly, because the businesses it currently holds have seen their share value drop sharply as punters head for less cyclical sectors. Zeder’s Pioneer stake, for example, was valued at R7.66bn last February: it’s worth R4.92bn now. And similarly for other businesses, like Quantum Foods. This has not been great, it is true, with Zeder’s own valuation, whose the sum-of-the-parts (SOTP) value per share, typically used to evaluate conglomerates, has declined from R6.23 last October to R5.79 now. But Zeder reckon this state of affairs means that across the sector food businesses are now attractively priced for acquisition, so they’re looking around. In their own portfolio, they’re looking for opportunities to dispose of underperforming assets and unbundle underperforming businesses.

Comment: Perhaps a good time to get on board. People are always going to need to eat, after all.

Recently, the dominant inflation narrative has been about how CPI is sticking obediently to the Reserve Bank’s targeted band. But it did kick up from 4.1% in February to 4.5% for March, driven thither by increasing food prices, public transport costs, school fees and housing costs inter alia. The increase has predictably had its greatest impact on lower-income households, who have barely benefited for the Government’s expansion of the VAT-free list, according to research by the always incisive Pietermaritzburg Economic Justice & Dignity Group. One of the effects of this has been an increase in people seeking credit just to make ends meet. This stat was already on the rise: applications for unsecured loans rose to a record 12 million for the last quarter of 2018 according to the National Credit Regulator. A greater than usual number of these were rejected as credit conditions tightened.

Comment: It is desperate out there for many South Africans, and difficult to see how conditions will improve in the short to medium term.

In the UK, Aldi are trialling automated self-checkout tills in their Glascote store in Staffordshire. Rival Lidl already has a similar system in 150 of its 740 UK stores. Tesco’s results, released last week, seem to indicate that its profit-recovery strategy has been a cautious if not unqualified success – with competition from Aldi and Lidl being seen by some commentators as a future constraint for the grocery giant. In the US, Lidl have bought 27 Best Market supermarkets in New York and New Jersey, a move that will force existing competitors to trim their prices further. And in Turin, Italy, Lidl has planted its first urban rooftop garden, a 1,400m2 experimental facility aimed in part at combatting the effects of climate change and supporting international agricultural projects. Finally, in China, Walmart are planning to open 40 members-only Sam’s Club stores by 2020.

Awooogah! Awooogah! Jargon alert. Coca-Cola is apparently piloting something called an “experience-led approach to integrated marketing” in the gimmick-hungry South East Asia region. According to the regional director of integrated marketing communication, the next steps in what seems to be an utterly impenetrable strategy, or an impenetrable repackaging of basic brand marketing anyway, are “around benchmarking and creating an index of measurability to the concept of integrated brand experience (IBX).”