Big up to the Big Blue, who turned in a cracker set of numbers last week, with turnover +7.1% to R86.3bn and HEPS up +18%. Coming off the back of what has been a difficult time for the PnP business, growth in the Beloved Country was particularly pleasing, with gross profit +7.8% YoY. Between PnP and Boxer, the Group opened 110 net new stores, closing 20 underperformers, adding 2.3% to turnover growth, and refurbed 103. This puts like-store growth at +4.8%, in an economy growing at around a quarter of that. Centralised distribution rollout continued, with 75% of the supply chain now centralised, up 10 percentage points from last year. Significantly, trading margin – where PnP has lagged some of its competitors – was up to 2.4%, edging closer to PnP’s 3% medium-term goal.

Comment: A feather in the cap of the team. What is important is to unpack the business and understand which formats and focus areas are driving the growth (e.g. a winning PnP private label offering) across the Group.

Another store for Shoprite in Nairobi this week, its second in that booming Kenyan city, and halfway to the four they plan on having there by the end of the year. Kenya is a bridgehead for further East African expansion, and an interesting market, where the informal and independent trade rubs shoulders with local grocers like Tusky’s and Chandarana, and with French outfit (they say “outfee”) Carrefour, which has been in-country since 1995 when it was introduced by Majid Al Futtaim through a franchise agreement. Back home, Oom Christo is digging in on his price of R3.5bn for the repurchase of his super-powered deferred shares, which give him extra voting rights; some shareholders are opposing the deal. And speaking of shares, new CEO Pieter Engelbrecht is voting with his wallet, springing R20m for 115,000 of the little blighters, which in this market is what we call bullish.

Comment: It’s time, we believe, for Shoprite to move on from Christo Wiese and his drama, whatever it costs.

Nice work from Shoprite, making it easy for punters at select supermarkets in KZN and the Eastern Cape to add R5 or more to their grocery bill for donation to Gift of the Givers flood relief efforts in those stricken regions. Tymebank have recruited up their 250,000th customer, a whacking 78% of whom have signed up at kiosks in Pick n Pays and Boxers around the country. Speaking of financial services, 125,000 people are now using Pick n Pay’s credit account to help buy groceries. Finally, Woolies has announced the national rollout, after successful trials, of a range of low-cost reusable shopping bags.

Comment: It’s hard to envision a day when our industry will finally be weaned of its destructive packaging habit. But we’ll take the incremental changes as they come.

Doug McMillon has been Walmart CEO for five years; here, succinctly put, and in no particular order, are the lessons he’s learned in that time: lead from the front; embrace risk; play the long game; people make the difference; and communicate your good works. Easy. Still on Walmart, in the UK the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) has blocked the proposed merger of Sainsbury’s and Walmart subsidiary Asda. In France, Walmart rival Amazon is cementing ties with retailer Casino, installing pick-up lockers in stores and making more of the Casino’s products available on Amazon. While back in the US, Amazon have announced that they will cut delivery time for top shoppers from two days to one, putting more pressure on Walmart.

Comment: Like mastodons, bellowing at each other across the swamp. And mastodons were also once considered too big to fail.

In one of those unsightly Goliath against David stories from which the PR firms employed by giant multinationals seem unable to protect them, PepsiCo are suing four Indian farmers in the state of Gujarat for patent infringement. The farmers, it is alleged, are guilty of growing FC5, the variety of low-moisture potato from which PepsiCo’s popular Lay’s chips are made. How the farmers came by the seeds for the variety is not disclosed, but PepsiCo is taking the issue seriously, suing the crew of rustic scallywags for 10 million rupees, in order, they say, to protect the farmers who grow the special spud legitimately.

Comment: There seems to be a brisk trade in dodgy seeds on the subcontinent: Monsanto pulled some of its businesses out of India in 2017 after a cotton seed dispute with the agricultural fraternity.

IoT, eh? Machine learning. Disruptive technologies. AI. Microservice architecture. A brave new world, and no mistake. Just ask SABInbevMillerWhatever. They’re working with a service provider called Thingstream (and don’t get us started on that, for a name) who are providing them with an IoT connectivity solution – called the Fridgelogic Connected Cooler system – which will help them track not only the location but also the temperature of every last one of their sponsored fridges, across the Beloved Country. Why on earth? Because it “ensures efficiencies, cost savings and ultimately beers and drinks served at the perfect temperature,” says no less a personage than Thingstream’s Neil Hamilton. And who are we to argue.

Comment: If this means that the beer police are going to pitch up at the front door to inform you that the precious darlings need to be kept at exactly the right level of chill or else they will be taken to a place of safety, well, there we might have a problem.

How’s the old trade balance, you enquire with a cocked eyebrow, peering at us over the top of your newspaper. Funny you should ask: not bad, considering. For the otherwise unremarkable month of March, our exports jumped +7.5% on a month-on-month basis to R105.4bn, while imports climbed +6.6% to R100.4bn. This leaves us – do the numbers – R5bn to the good, which sounds alright to us. Elsewhere in the economy, not so clever: the dear old South African consumer is about to be hit by the second-highest fuel prices ever, beaten only by that time when Nasser closed the Suez Canal back in late 2018, wasn’t it? Yonks ago, anyway. And a weaker rand means an uptick in the inflation rate, and no chance that Lesetja Kganyago over at the Reserve Bank is likely to cut the rate anytime soon.

Comment: Still, it was nice about the trade balance, wasn’t it?