Not the sort of thing one has come to expect from the Big Red One but Shoprite has even the hoarier souls of the Young Analysts Sporting and Public Schools Club scratching their grizzled heads in puzzlement about the news that the numbers this time around are a touch shy of where they were meant to be. Total sales for the year to end June were up 7.3% to R72.3billion, where analysts had estimated they would be up around the mid 74s. Sales in the RS of A rose 7.2%, while elsewhere on the Mother Continent they edged up just 2.1% in rand currency terms. You will, however, be pleased to know that our Uncle Sydney believes this to be an “astonishingly good performance in a very tight, competitive environment”, characterised by deflation in some categories, which the retail boys hate.

Comment: Don’t get the boys from Brackenfell in a corner. Ooooooh! Ouch! We warned you!

With a carefree toss of its boyish locks, Woolies has issued a rather cheerful little trading update for the year to the end of June, with Group sales up 9.4%, like store sales up 6.3%, clothing sales up 11.5%, food 10.7% and 8.4% in comparable stores, and trading space up a pleasing 7.6%. The only weevil in the biscuit, wouldn’t you know it, is Australia, where sales at Country Road fell 2%, or 10.9% on a comparable store basis. A possible reason for this, suggests one gimlet-eyed analyst, is a leadership vacuum left by the departure of Ian Moir for these greener, more pleasant shores. In South Africa, reckons the same young blade, the pleasing result stems from the resurgence of the posher punter and her increasing freedom from debt now that she’s downgraded to an A-Class.

Comment: The recent uptick in food inflation, always a welcome guest for retailers, can’t hurt either.

Pick n Pay and SACCAWU are headed to the CCMA in order to find a way of avoiding the retrenchment of 3,200 of Pick n Pay’s staff. One of the thornier issues likely to be tabled is what might jointly be done to reduce the Big Blue’s labour costs, which came in last year at around R4.3bilion and are routinely two percentage points of turnover higher than any other retailer, which goes some way to explain Pick n Pay’s lower margin relative to the like of Shoprite. Some analysts have hailed this acknowledgement and the possible retrenchments themselves as evidence of a new hard-nosed realism in the business, while SACCAWU has taken issue with commentators who believe last year’s strike led to poor performance and thus indirectly to the retrenchments.

Comment: We look forward to an amicable resolution to this challenging situation. And to the advent of porcine aviation.

Illovo is well on the way to becoming that rarest of creatures, a business which is able to fuel itself, making serous progress in becoming self-sufficient for power and even in some instances pumping electricity into the national grids of some of the six countries in which it operates. At the newly-expanded factory and co-generation plant in Swaziland, for e.g., the plant will supply all its own power and export surplus electricity to the national grid via an agreement with the Swaziland Electricity Company. “How does it do this?” you ask. Mainly from bagasse, a by-product after the extraction of sugar from the cane, which is used as boiler fuel. An added bonus is molasses, another by-product, which is used for the production of high quality potable alcohol, or cane spirits, whichever way you’d prefer to see it.

Comment: Sippin’ on cane, watching the production line, warmin’ my toes on the bagasse boiler ... I tell ya’, Steve, this is the life...

Every couple of years, Tetrapak published the breezily-titled Mission Impossible report, detailing past achievements and future plans. And in the current one, the big news is (you guessed it) all about sustainability. Tetrapak has put in place a 2020 strategy, 2020 being a year which seems designed for strategies and visions and processes and must win battles, and this strategy puts Tetrapak’s environmental ambitions at the heart of its business. In the meantime, the business has met its 2010 climate goal, reducing carbon emissions by 13%, and undertaking to cap emissions at the 2010 level across the value chain by 2020. It has increased its recycling of used cartons by over a billion a year since 2002, and plans to double the recycling rate on its beverage cartons by 2020, focusing on using 100% of renewable materials in future products.

Comment: Nice work, that oddly-shaped, sloshy, boxy feller!

Lauren Siebrits has been appointed as CEO of IFFCO South Africa, which was launched late last year by parent company IFFCO Worldwide. IFFCO Worldwide is a United Arab Emirates-based international group, which manufactures and markets a range of mass market food products, related derivatives, intermediates and services, which we presume you know what those are and we don’t have time to explain here. Lauren Siebrits is an innovative results-driven professional who once headed up Simba and has enjoyed a successful career in such businesses as Borden Foods, Coca-Cola, DairyBelle and SmithKline Beecham. IFFCO’s flagship brand is the Tiffany range of biscuits, which has been imported by Shoprite for the past eight years.

Comment: Despite Walmart’s absence from the market during that period.

For the first time in how long now, according to the bearded pipe-tuggers at StatsSA, Retail Trade Sales were flat year-on-year for the month of May, recording neither growth nor decline, for a total figure of 0.0%, after a revised growth of 10% year-on-year for the month of April. This confounded a panel of highly-paid economists, who had predicted growth of between 4.5% and 8.7%, although none of them as far as we know were formally reprimanded for this display of persistent and flagrant incompetence. Furniture dealers grew sales 6.3% during the period in question, pharmacists grew sales 3.8%, while the biggest losers were hardware stores (- 8.5%) and retailers of food, beverages and tobacco (-8.4%).

Comment: Please – some classifications we can all understand, for once!

Le Grand Bleu has signed up its Shield brand as “Official Deodorant of the Springboks” and Vaseline as “Official Skincare of the Springboks”, celebrating the deals in a tree-planting ceremony at head office with John Smit, who has reached the tree-planting phase of his career.

And in other sponsorship news, Clover, recently in the news for having the best-named turnaround plan with its Project Cielo Blu strategy, is pumping R30million into the Aardklop National Arts festival in Potch over the next five years, thus cementing the powerful but less than obvious link between the visual and performing arts and milk and milk-derivatives. Seriously though, nice one, Clover, who have a long-term strategy to position themselves as a custodian of the arts.

HCI apparently have no immediate ambitions to increase their stake in KWV over 35%, according to HCI CEO Johnny Copelyn. Last week we reported that KWV CEO Thys Loubser had resigned somewhat abruptly – apparently the move had been on the cards since the HCI acquisition of 34.9% of the business earlier this year. Shifty-eyed industry insiders claim that HCI executive André van der Veen moved into Loubser’s office while the latter was on a trip to France.