| Tuesday 02 November 2021 Good morning Voornaam, If you read InceConnect yesterday, then you can skip on down to Chris Gilmour's piece as well as a forex update from Currency Assist. The articles on The Foschini Group and Distell are identical to what went out yesterday. We've also included the latest episode of Magic Markets again, in which Mohammed Nalla and I spoke with Kate Mackenzie, an ESG specialist and Bloomberg Green columnist based in Australia. Of course, if you missed it yesterday, then welcome! I hope you did the right thing yesterday and made your voice heard in our democracy. All the updates below are from Friday, as yesterday was a public holiday. Oceana Group released a concerning announcement that thereis a delay in finalising the group's financial results for the year endedSeptember. The issue is mainly an accounting matter related to the group's UnitedStates subsidiary. The board does not believe that the matter will have amaterial impact on the financials, but the company fell 2.9% regardless.
Telkom expects HEPS for the six months to September to be25% to 35% higher than the comparable period, coming in at between 273.8 and295.5 cents. The main driver of this increase was a 35% drop in financecharges, fair value movements and foreign exchange losses. Debt repayments aregood news in terms of strengthening the business, but shareholders would'vealso liked to see a positive narrative around the operations as well. Nampak has secured a trade finance facility with StandardBank for up to R1 billion. This will allow Nampak to sell a portion of itsaccounts receivable balances to the bank. The facility will be used to repaydebt, as Nampak needs to reduce interest-bearing debt by at least R1 billion byJune 2022. This goes a long way towards reducing the risk of being forced tosell produ ctive assets in a desperate sale. During October alone, R206 millionof the facility has been utilised. A couple of MTN's African subsidiaries released resultsrecently. The big one the market was waiting for was MTN Nigeria. The quarterended September reflected strong revenue cadence (2.2% growth on the previousquarter) and ongoing operating margin expansion (34.85% vs. 34.6% in the priorsix months). MTN closed 1.11% higher on the day. Massmart announced the completion of its transaction toacquire a 87.5% stake in OneCart. It will be interesting to see whether thishas the desired effect of helping the group compete with the likes of Takealot. In another example of a bank buying back its preferenceshares, Investec is making an offer to its preference shareholders to acquirethe shares at R99.52 per share. They were issued at an average of R99.30 pershare between 2003 and 2010. The market price before the offer was made was R85.50.A lack of liquidity hurt those who invested in these bank preference shares andthen tried to sell them in the open market. Let's get this short week off to a good start! The Finance Ghost | 