| I'd love to know what executives at Pick n Pay were thinking when they read rival retailer Shoprite's trading update for the year to end-June - just as they were preparing their own half-year earnings update. It's clear what the market thought: sending Shoprite's shares 8.5% higher on Monday and Pick n Pay's 5.4% lower yesterday. Of course, the two aren't directly comparable as Shoprite's performance also covers the period before the Covid-19 outbreak, while Pick n Pay's financial year started just as the pandemic hit our shores. It has also had to contend with retrenchment costs, which it says will even out in the second half of the year and result in cost savings in the periods to follow. Still, Shoprite appears to have fared better over the past few months. Meanwhile, investors have welcomed Royal Bafokeng Platinum's half-year results, with the group reporting a surge in profit as higher platinum group metals prices more than made up for downtime in the early stages of the national lockdown. Cartrack, too, has managed to grow revenue and operating profit despite the disruption caused by Covid-19. Also in today's newsletter, Blue Label Telecoms has notified the market that Cell C has defaulted on its loans again - although it wasn't unexpected due to an informal debt standstill. And Ecsponent says it will use the proceeds from the sale of its stake in MyBucks Zambia to pay down expensive debt. You'll find all the latest research from Ingham Analytics down below, too. You can get full access to all the good quality, independent, and reliable reports from the Ingham Analytics team as soon as they are released by subscribing. More details here. I hope you have a good day. Stephen Gunnion Managing Editor, InceConnect
The latest from Ingham Analytics Sasol is in the spotlight. In "Going, going for a song" Ingham Analytics say that if Sasol management keep flogging the shareholders' silver as they're attempting to do with the potential sale of sixteen air separation units located in Secunda to Air Liquide, they'll have to consider a rights issue after all. They quantify what the replacement cost is of the ASU's and the impact of a $2 billion rights issue. Air Liquide has a return on capital employed of 8.6%, say Ingham Analytics, so there will be some assumption of at least a cost of capital return, including maintenance and future replacement. Gold went passed $2,000 per ounce yesterday whilst the US ten-year Treasury went down to 0.52%. You've heard what all this means from Ingham Analytics and "Bedazzled" is right on the money in this regard and helps make sense (cents?) of it all. | 