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Woolies’ catch-all fashion, beauty and home category has had a, perhaps understandably, bad rap over the past few how many years? Turnover in the category grew only +3.5% to R12.8bn in the year through June, and has not achieved much better over the last five years. Digging into those unpromising numbers, though, it seems that the woeful performance of apparel is the only reason for this: over the same period, home and beauty enjoyed barnstorming growth averaging +18%. “While turning around our fashion business is clearly critical to protecting our core, the growth in beauty and home provides us with the opportunity to expand more,” observes CEO Roy Bagattini. Accordingly, Woolies is focused on growing its beauty offering as a destination category, adding brands and extending the online reach inter alia; this alia includes the addition of professional skincare brand Dermologica to its online catalogue.

Comment: Mark our words, Woolies is back, at least on these shores, presenting lots of opportunities for savvy suppliers.

Kit Kat Cash and Carry began life as the Kit Kat Café in the old Asiatic Bazaar in 1953. Today, the Gauteng-based business boasts four big-box cash and carry stores, with another one opening in Crown Mines this week and a sixth in Mamelodi in November, four hybrid Express Cash and Carrys, and 21 Express Supermarkets, serving LSMs one through eight by that discontinued, but still useful, measurement. The Crown Mines store is an all-new 23,000m2 behemoth, which will carry around 22,000 SKUs, from “bricks to bread” in the words of CEO Riaz Gani, and offer payment services including lights and water, and DStv. It will soon be launching its own loyalty programme, driven by the data from hundreds of thousands of daily transactions, from tuck shops and schools to consumers.

Comment: As Kit Kat demonstrates, South Africa’s independent retail and wholesale trade is thriving and growing, offering all the services, value and convenience of its corporate counterparts. For more on doing business in this vibrant sector, join Trade Intelligence at our annual Independent Trade Forum on 19 and 20 October.

More on Shoprite’s divestment from Uganda: The Big Red One has apparently sold its six stores there to Majid Al Futtaim, a United Arab Emirates-based mall developer that holds Carrefour franchise rights in dozens of countries. Shoprite had been operating in Uganda since 2000; Majid since 2019. It’s also a force in Kenya where it has been much assisted by the decline of local retailers like Nakumatt. Back in the Beloved Country, Pick n Pay has reclaimed the title of most used loyalty programme in South Africa for its Smart Shopper scheme, according to the BrandMapp survey which reveals that 22% more South Africans consumers have been using the programme versus 2019. Smart Shopper transactions now account for 75% of sales at The Big Blue. Finally, Clicks has just received its first pay-out of R217m from the South African Special Risks Insurance Association (SASRIA) against its claim of R726m for losses and damages to stock and infrastructure resulting from the July unrest.

Comment: The events of July will have repercussions for our industry and our country for years to come.

Amid all the news about warehouse fires and unemployed robots, it has been easy to forget that UK outfit, Ocado, is at its core a successful online retailer, which last week launched an own-brand household essentials range, that joins the over 500 own-label food products available on the website. Over in the US, and speaking of robot armies, Walmart, which has tested delivery via driverless trucks, drones, and robots, is gearing up to add driverless cars to the mix, trialling the approach in Austin, Miami, and Washington DC later on this year in custom Fords equipped with Argo AI’s self-driving software. They’re also adding in-store services, including in-store dining via Wendy’s Hamburger Stands and Ghost Kitchen Brands, and T-Mobile phone stores in almost 2,300 Walmart locations.

Comment: Cellular service and in-store dining look like the next frontier of relatively easy wins for retailers back home in South Africa. Driverless delivery can wait.

An absolutely blistering set of results from IMPERIAL Logistics, which in support of the old saying about an ill wind blowing nobody any good, increased revenue, excluding assets that have been sold, by +13% to R52.2bn for the year through June, with operating profit storming through up +60% to R2.34bn, even after the deduction of R364m due to COVID-19-related lockdowns and restrictions. “There are positive things that we need to take advantage of that have been a result of some of the impacts of COVID-19, particularly the need for resiliency in supply chains,” says CEO Mohammed Akoojee, with refreshing bluntness. “As such our services have become even more relevant.” Such services, as you know, include the transportation of everything from fuel and health-care products to alcohol, household products and food. The business was also not much affected by July’s unrest. IMPERIAL also benefited from its positioning as an end-to-end route-to-market business across the African continent.

Comment: Powerful stuff from a great South African business with a targeted offering across a diverse customer base.

Some lesser bits and pieces from our great suppliers this week. First up, Astral Foods has warned that its profit – presumably measured by HEPS – for the 12 months to end-September will be -25% lower than the previous year, mainly because of higher input costs, specifically for soya and maize. This represents a second-half improvement; numbers for the first six months were down -37% YOY. Next up, PepsiCo have launched South Africa’s first branded hashtag on TikTok, to alert the public to the release of the Flamin’ Hot variant. #DoritosFlaminHotDuets features a flaming Branded Effect on TikTok, alongside a dance challenge with dancer/singer Kamo Mphela. And finally (in a welcome return to safer, more traditional ground for our writing staff) Happy Birthday to You, Ricoffy, coating palates and warming cockles with that rich caffeine flavour for 50 years now, during some of which you obligingly kept us awake the night before finals.

Comment: What came first: the unprofitable chicken or the punishingly high input prices?

According to the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU), South Africa is the only one of the G20 group of countries that will not achieve pre-COVID-19 levels of economic growth before 2022. While the global economy is expected to grow by +5.4% this year, South Africa is on track to achieve only +4.2%. “Slow vaccination rates will continue to weigh on economic recovery in this region, even after the lifting of hard lockdowns,” says Reserve Bank guvnor Lesego Kganyago. It has been established, though, that our second quarter growth reached a better than expected +5%, so there’s that. In the meantime, the 2021 Economic Freedom of the World report is out, and it reveals the unwelcome truth that South Africa’s ranking has dropped to 84th out of 165 from 58th in the year 2000. Economic freedom promotes upward mobility, and in South Africa is somewhat constrained by government regulation and tighter labour markets.

Comment: There’s always been a fine line between a living wage for the employed and the cost of new labour for business in our economically fractured nation.