Star 2023-03-31

SHOPRITE is gunning for the more than R100 billion South African apparel retail market, aiming its new Uniq clothing chain at the women’s, men’s and children’s wear sector with medium to high- end price ranges. South Africa’s largest retailer opened the first Uniq apparel retail store in Cape Town yesterday. It touted select items such as T-shirts priced at R149, joggers priced at R299 and R799 puffer jackets as it gears up to roll out seven additional Uniq stores in the next few weeks. Shoprite is launching a foray into an apparel retail market that already has Pick n Pay’s clothing division, Mr Price and Foschini among other players. According to Statista, the South African apparel market will record about R108bn in revenues this year. However, a weaker rand,…

MOBILE operator MTN SA yesterday outlined how it was investing more than R1.5 billion to strengthen its network’s resilience and customers connected as it battled load shedding, site vandalism and battery theft. The investment will see it installing solar power, batteries, and generators, and enhancing security features at base stations to ensure improved network availability during load shedding, when many instances of theft and vandalism occurred. Statistics showed that bouts of load shedding led to a spike in vandalism and battery or generator theft at network sites. MTN said for instance, during the period of stage 6 load shedding last year there was a major escalation of attacks and tower companies recorded a 250% increase in the loss of generators. Journalists yesterday were taken on a site tour…

SA Reserve Bank yesterday shocked the market with a severely hawkish stance HOMEOWNERS will be the most impacted by the cost of borrowing in South Africa, which has risen to its highest in nearly 14 years, in spite of dwindling economic growth forecasts. The South African Reserve Bank (SARB) yesterday shocked the market with a severely hawkish stance, and raised its benchmark lending rate by 50 basis points from 7.25% to 7.75% per annum. While the markets had expected a smaller 25 basis points increase, this rate hike raised the prime lending rate from 10.75% to 11.25% per annum. This was the ninth consecutive rate hike since policy normalisation started in November 2021, bringing borrowing costs to the highest since May 2009, in a bid to curb runaway inflation. Headline…

NINE banks are now in the Competition Tribunal’s crosshairs as in a crucial ruling the body ruled yesterday that it had the jurisdiction to hear the so-called “Forex Cartel case”, in which foreign and local banks (respondents) were implicated in alleged collusion to manipulate the rand-dollar exchange rate. The nine banks added are local banks (Nedbank Group; Nedbank Ltd; FirstRand; FirstRand Bank) as well as international banks (HSBC Bank USA, National Association; Merrill Lynch Pierce Fenner and Smith; Bank of America; Credit Suisse Securities (USA) and Standard Americas). If found guilty the tribunal has the right to levy a fine of up to 10% of in-country annual turnover. This as local banks turnover amounts to billions of rands. The financial scandal came to light in 2013, involving 28 banks from…

A GROUP of business leaders and academics signed a letter asking companies like OpenAI, Google and Microsoft to stop training more powerful AI systems so the industry can assess the risks they pose. Twitter CEO Elon Musk, veteran AI computer scientist Yoshua Bengio and Emad Mostaque, the CEO of fast-growing start-up Stability AI, all signed the letter, along with around 1 000 other members of the business, academic and tech worlds, though the list was not independently verified. “Should we automate away all the jobs, including the fulfilling ones? Should we develop nonhuman minds that might eventually outnumber, outsmart, obsolete and replace us?,” the letter said. “Powerful AI systems should be developed only once we are confident that their effects will be positive and their risks will be manageable.”…

NAMPAK said yesterday that it had appointed a restructuring officer to drive turnaround initiatives at the packaging group, and a restructuring plan had been submitted to lenders along with requests for debt extensions. The update was not well received by the market, as the share price closed 2.11% lower at 93 cents on the JSE yesterday, well down from R3.41 a year ago, while five years ago, the share was trading above R16. Opportune Investments chief investment officer Chris Logan said he believed the price fell because the update held “more of the same bad news for Nampak”, including big foreign exchange losses and and “huge impairment losses to come.” However, he said the appointment of a restructuring committee comprising directors put forward by a dissident shareholder group was…