The Warner Bros. Discovery bidding war through a South African lens
The recent bidding war for Warner Bros. Discovery (WBD) – which pitted Netflix against Paramount Skydance and ultimately produced a US$110,9bn deal – is an interesting case study in contested takeover dynamics. While it played out under US takeover rules, the structural and governance tensions at its core are strikingly relevant to South African corporates.
The WBD bidding war – a chronological overview
WBD entered 2025 burdened by substantial legacy debt and declining television revenues. In June 2025, management announced plans to split the business into two entities. The announcement signalled, explicitly or not, that the company was “in play”.
Following the announcement, multiple parties – including Netflix and Paramount Skydance – submitted formal proposals. In October 2025, WBD confirmed it was reviewing unsolicited offers and subsequently entered into exclusive negotiations with Netflix, culminating in a definitive agreement in December 2025.
The agreement with Netflix seemed to have closed the door on Paramount and other bidders. It had not.
Paramount did not withdraw. Instead, it launched what effectively became a protracted hostile campaign. By January 2026, Paramount had launched a hostile tender offer to WBD shareholders at $30 per share (a premium of about 139% to the undisturbed Netflix share price). WBD’s board rejected this bid and reaffirmed its support for Netflix.
Facing mounting shareholder pressure and governance scrutiny regarding whether it had adequately discharged its fiduciary obligations, WBD’s board opened a seven-day negotiating window with Paramount in late February 2026. Paramount responded with its ninth revised offer: $31 per share, all-cash, for the entire company, with a ‘ticking fee’ of $650 million per quarter for closing delays beyond 31 December 2026. On 26 February 2026, the WBD board determined that Paramount’s revised $110,9bn offer constituted a “superior proposal”. Netflix declined to increase its bid and withdrew, leaving Paramount as the winning bidder.
Lessons for SA target company Boards
Lesson 1: Early constitution of the Independent Board South Africa’s Takeover Regulations mandate that an “Independent Board” – comprising directors who have no conflicting interests in relation to the transaction – be constituted in relation to “affected transactions” to evaluate bids and make recommendations to shareholders. Affected transactions include control transactions and disposals of all or a greater part of a regulated company’s assets or undertaking. Whilst every situation has its own unique considerations, constituting the Independent Board early, with genuinely independent and commercially astute directors, is critical. Its composition will be scrutinised by the Takeover Regulation Panel (“TRP”), which is the primary regulator for affected transactions. Appointing directors who have pre-existing relationships with a bidder, or who hold material equity interests that skew their incentives, will attract TRP scrutiny and undermine the legitimacy of its ultimate recommendation.
As a matter of practicality, when strategic interest from potential acquirers is first identified – even at preliminary, non-binding stages – the board should already be mapping conflicts and identifying the Independent Board designates.
Lesson 2: Engage the TRP proactively, not reactively The TRP is not merely a box-ticking regulator. It has broad supervisory powers over affected transactions. Boards that engage proactively with the TRP – briefing it on process, seeking guidance on novel structural questions, and ensuring key approvals are lined up in advance of key decision points – are in a far stronger position than those who appear before it under fire.
Lesson 3: ‘No-Shop’ does not mean ‘No-Engage’ One of the clearest lessons from the WBD saga is the risk of a board appearing to be a passive gatekeeper for the preferred bidder, rather than an active steward of shareholder value. In the WBD deal, WBD had signed up to market standard “no-shop” undertakings (i.e. undertakings to negotiate exclusively with Netflix and not to actively solicit interest from third parties). WBD’s board, while within its contractual rights to rebuff Paramount’s early bids, faced legitimate criticism that it was slow to test the market properly.
Under South African law, this tension is resolved by statute: the board cannot, as a matter of law, prevent a bona fide competing bidder from accessing information or from putting its case to shareholders. A board that attempts to entrench a preferred deal by refusing to engage with a higher competing offer risks not only regulatory sanction from the TRP, but also personal liability exposure for its directors under the Companies Act.
The fiduciary duty is to the company and ultimately its shareholders – not to the preferred bidder, however well-negotiated the initial deal was.
Lesson 4: Structure deal protections to survive a superior offer landscape South African target boards and their advisers should ensure that deal protection mechanisms are carefully calibrated: •Rights to match should have reasonable exercise periods – long enough to allow a genuine response, short enough not to chill competing interest. •Break fees should compensate the preferred bidder for its transaction costs without being so large as to deter third-party interest. The TRP will not generally permit break fees in excess of 1% of deal value. •“Fiduciary-out” provisions must be expressly preserved – these allow the board to change its recommendation or terminate an agreed transaction if a superior proposal emerges, when sticking with the original deal would breach its fiduciary duties.
Lesson 5: Shareholder engagement is not optional A recurring theme in the WBD saga was the voice of institutional shareholders.
South African institutional investors have become significantly more activist. In a contested takeover, boards that communicate early, transparently and substantively with their major institutional shareholders will be better positioned to maintain trust and manage the process effectively.
Lesson 6: Secure the regulatory pathway before recommending Anti-trust clearance is a mandatory step for South African M&A above applicable thresholds. The South African competition authorities have demonstrated a willingness to impose merger-specific and other public interest conditions relating to employment, localisation and supplier development, amongst others. In evaluating competing offers, target companies must assess the likely regulatory pathway for each. A higher offer that faces greater competition or public interest risk may deliver less certain value than a lower-priced offer with a cleaner regulatory profile. In South Africa, the length of time it has historically taken to obtain regulatory approvals has effectively acted as an impediment to hostile transactions. Understanding this dynamic, and designing the transaction in a way that mitigates it, is therefore essential to potential bidders looking to launch deals on an unsolicited basis.
Sibonelo Mdluli is a Senior Transactor | RMB Corporate Finance
This article first appeared in DealMakers, SA’s quarterly M&A publication.
Too many multinational exits in Africa fail – not because of weak demand, but because the process is not adapted to the buyer universe.
Drawing on our experience as M&A advisors, we share practical reflections on what it takes to execute successful multinational exits from Africa, with a particular focus on how to manage the specificities of such processes in an African context.
A quiet but structural shift in Africa’s corporate landscape
Not long ago, Unilever was, by far, the leading distribution player in French-speaking West Africa, with large fleets of trucks serving small shopkeepers across the region. The group operated asset-heavy, vertically integrated businesses, combining manufacturing facilities with extensive palm plantations for edible oil and soap production. Two decades later, most of these assets have been divested to local players, following a series of headquarters-driven decisions, culminating in a near-complete exit from the region by 2026. Unilever is now largely absent from West Africa, including key markets such as Ghana and Nigeria, where subsidiaries have either been sold or wound down. Across these markets, the group has shifted from a dominant mass-market player – with 20% to 50% market shares, strong local brands and deep operational presence – to a lighter, more selective model focused on distributing a limited range of international brands targeting higher-income consumers.
The Unilever story is just one illustration of a broader structural trend, and this evolution is neither isolated nor cyclical. Similar dynamics can be observed across sectors. While the underlying drivers may differ – including capital allocation, regulatory complexity, foreign exchange constraints and compliance considerations – the overall direction is consistent. In banking, European institutions that once held significant market shares across North and West Africa have substantially reduced their presence following the disposal of subsidiaries by Société Générale, BNP Paribas and Crédit Agricole. In the manufacturing space, groups such as Air Liquide have divested multiple African operations – including the sale of 13 subsidiaries in 2024 – as part of broader portfolio rationalisation efforts. Comparable trends are visible in other sectors, including insurance, energy and cement, where several European players have scaled back or exited their positions.
Against this backdrop, divesting multinational assets in Africa has become both more frequent and more complex, requiring processes that are carefully structured and actively managed to succeed. The remainder of this note focuses on how such processes can be adapted to local market dynamics, based on our experience advising on these transactions.
Taking stock of the actual buyer universe for multinationals in Africa
A key starting point is that multinational assets in Africa are generally attractive and marketable, and can generate meaningful investor interest. The challenge is not the absence of demand – it is the structure of that demand. Yet many processes are delayed or weakened by recurring pitfalls, despite strong in-house M&A capabilities on the seller side. These transactions, therefore, require a specific approach, taking into account their African context.
A defining feature of the private sector in many sub-Saharan African countries is the relative lack of M&A market liquidity. A large portion of potential buyers are family-backed groups of limited to mid-scale size, and with varying degrees of sophistication and formalisation. Private equity funds and more structured regional players are also active, but few are structured to take controlling stakes, and even fewer are equipped to manage complex carve-out situations. In practice, this means that local family groups often constitute the most credible buyer universe for multinational divestments, requiring adjustments to both the positioning of the asset and the execution process. Local family groups tend to place significant value on the reputation, compliance standards and operational rigor associated with multinational assets. These assets often include long-established operations with valuable real estate, strong legacy brands and underexploited potential. Larger family groups with exposure to adjacent sectors are typically those best positioned to generate synergies and to submit the most compelling offers, particularly where assets require repositioning.
In Africa, the question is not whether there are buyers – it is whether the process is designed for them.
To address this reality, M&A advisors need to deploy a tailored toolbox. Their role is not limited to running a process, but also to designing a transaction perimeter that the market can effectively absorb. Multinational assets are often sizeable, relative to the financial capacity of local buyers, which may require restructuring the perimeter – through partial disposals, leverage optimisation or asset separation – to enhance affordability. This is particularly relevant for transactions with a significant real estate component, valuable intellectual property or a multi-country footprint, where a piecemeal approach may unlock greater value. While this increases execution complexity for the seller, it can significantly broaden the buyer universe and improve outcomes. Equally important, the gap in working cultures, transaction experience and M&A language between buyers and sellers can lead to misunderstandings and mistrust, which can, in turn, result in misinterpretations on both sides (e.g. information requests perceived as hesitation, or process discipline perceived as mistrust). In this context, the role of the advisor extends beyond execution to include active facilitation and, at times, buyer education. This is particularly true for technical aspects, such as Transition Services Agreements (TSAs), which are often critical in carve-out situations but may be unfamiliar to certain buyer profiles.
Navigating through other local parameters
Equally important, the seller must be fully aligned internally – across local management, regional teams and headquarters – on key parameters such as perimeter, valuation expectations, approval processes and fallback options. Misalignment at this level can quickly undermine execution. Other recurring aspects include the difficulty of transferring and repatriating funds, particularly for locally based buyers, with direct implications on transaction structuring, conditions precedent, escrow arrangements and timing. Regulatory frameworks may also lack clarity, increasing legal uncertainty around approvals and closing mechanics. These constraints can result in protracted timelines, with processes sometimes extending up to two years end-to-end – often twice as long as comparable transactions in more developed markets. Finally, confidentiality is also often an issue, as it is more difficult to preserve in an African context, with information leakages occurring more frequently. This is particularly sensitive for multinational sellers, who may be exposed to political interference or operate listed subsidiaries, increasing the potential impact of premature disclosures. In this context, communication planning should be treated as a core transaction workstream, rather than an afterthought.
Overall, Africa remains a distinct and sometimes challenging M&A environment for multinational companies. The key takeaway, however, is that the success of a divestment is rarely driven by the intrinsic quality of the asset alone, but by the ability to anticipate local constraints and structure the process accordingly.
The difference between a failed process and a successful exit is not the asset; it is the quality of the preparation.
Daniel Outré is a Partner | Enexus
This article first appeared in DealMakers AFRICA, the continent’s quarterly M&A publication.
Vukile is doing well everywhere – but especially in South Africa
CA&S dips into digital (JSE: CAA)
This is an interesting acquisition!
CA Sales Holdings (JSE: CAA) (known as CA&S) has earned a solid reputation for making excellent use of bolt-on acquisitions to bolster their operations across Africa.
We are used to seeing them acquire route-to-market companies. This helps FMCG players reach customers through a combination of distribution and merchandising services.
But the latest deal is quite different, as CA&S has stepped into the digital and eCommerce space. Omnichannel retail is becoming an increasingly important element of the retail landscape and this has been a blind spot for CA&S.
To address this gap, they’ve taken a 30% stake in The Digital Media Consultancy (TDMC), a company that offers services from Shopify development right through to email marketing and even influencer management. This is an interesting step!
In classic CA&S style, the deal includes a pathway to control. They are able to take a further 21% stake via call options, which would give them a total of 51%.
There’s no indication of the financial value of the deal. All we know is that it is too small to be categorised for the JSE or the Botswana Stock Exchange.
Ghost Bite: It’s great to see CA&S dipping their toes into the future. Bricks-and-mortar retail has a long way to go (especially in Africa), but bringing in an omnichannel skillset can only be valuable over the long term.
Chuckles all around for Premier investors (JSE: PMR)
Hopefully a new era at the companywon’t leave a bad taste
Premier continues to be a wonderful example of the power of operating leverage. Revenue increased by 6.6% in the year ended March 2026, which you wouldn’t exactly classify as an exciting growth story. But once you work your way down the income statement and find HEPS growth of 27.7%, you might feel differently!
Premier is a food business with extensive exposure to bakery categories (Millbake was 81% of revenue in this period). This means that there are many factors at play here, including external commodity prices like maize. If price deflation is met by strong enough growth in volumes, then manufacturing efficiencies can be realised.
With group EBITDA margin up by 130 basis points to 13.1%, as well as operating profit margin up 150 basis points to 11.1%, there’s plenty for shareholders to feel good about here. The chef’s kiss for HEPS was a 27.5% decrease in net finance costs, driven by reduced debt levels.
When your cash generated from operations increases by 39.5%, chances are good that the health of your balance sheet will improve as well. The group leverage ratio is just 0.5x, so most of the uplift in growth between revenue and HEPS is thanks to operating leverage (fixed costs) rather than financial leverage (debt).
Digging deeper, Millbake achieved revenue growth of 5.1% and EBITDA growth of 18.3%, so the bakery team deserves plenty of credit (as usual).
The Groceries and International segment was skewed by the acquisition of RFG in March 2026. Although the results were only included for less than a month, this still bumped up growth in this division, as Premier essentially bought more earnings. Groceries and International grew revenue by 13.5% and EBITDA by 29.6%.
The shape of the group will change given the recent acquisitions. Millbake is expected to be two-thirds of EBITDA going forwards. My hope is that they don’t dilute the elements of the Premier business model that make it so special. The history books are filled with FMCG companies that tried too hard to diversify and ended up diworsifying instead.
Ghost Bites: On top of all the other good news, Premier also took on the chocolate range at Woolworths. With the share price up 34% over 12 months, it’s Chuckles all round for investors. But I must be honest that I can taste a difference in Chuckles (other than the red pack, which hasn’t changed), while a quick online search reveals that I’m not the only one. I suspect I’m heading back to Whispers for my chocolate fix.
Stor-Age is struggling in the UK (JSE: SSS)
The UK economy can be unforgiving
Stor-Age has a more even split across SA and the UK than most people realise. These days, they have 64 properties at home and 46 in the UK. Stor-Age isn’t thought of as an example of a major offshore expansion strategy, but they probably deserve more credit for their growth ambitions.
The UK market hasn’t delivered great numbers in the latest period though. For the year ended March 2026, the SA portfolio achieved rental income growth of 10.5%, while net property operating income was up 11.1%. In the UK, rental income was up by just 1.1% and net property operating income dipped by 0.8%!
This is why the blended group results aren’t going to set anyone’s hair on fire. There was an increase in the number of shares in issue (they raised R500 million in December 2025), so growth of 8.4% in distributable earnings was diluted into dividend per share growth of 5.1%. It’s ahead of inflation, but not by much.
The net tangible asset value per share is up by 3.9%, so that at least that adds to the growth story alongside the dividend. With a loan-to-value ratio of 29.7%, the balance sheet is a decent story overall.
There’s clearly a lot of work to do in the UK, particularly as the occupancy rate is only 81.6% in that market vs. 93.4% in SA. They talk about a “tougher cyclical environment” for the UK platform.
Investors will hope that these are cyclical rather than structural issues, otherwise Stor-Age might start to be used as an example of offshore expansion for all the wrong reasons!
These difficulties mean that guidance for FY27 is distributable income per share growth of just 5.0%, much the same as we’ve seen in FY26.
Ghost Bite: The market didn’t love these numbers, with the share price down 3% on the day. At R16.70, Stor-Age is a long way off the 52-week high of R19.32 achieved in late February (before the macroeconomic situation changed thanks to the Iran conflict).
Vukile is doing well everywhere – but especially in South Africa (JSE: VKE)
These results are the perfect foundation for the expansion into Italy
Vukile Property Fund has released excellent numbers for the year ended March 2026. The total dividend for the year was up by 9.3%, offering investors a strong real return (the return ahead of inflation).
This growth was underpinned by exceptional numbers in South Africa. The local portfolio achieved like-for-like retail net operating income growth of 10.3%, with trading density up by an impressive 5.3%. This means that the shops are busier, so tenants are making money. And if tenants are doing well, the same is true for the landlord!
Aside from turnover clauses, the benefit also comes through in rental reversions, a measure of how the rental amount changed on a new lease vs. the previous lease. Reversions increased from +2.4% to +37%. The “+” signs are important there, as reversions can turn negative – just ask office property funds!
These solid numbers drove a 12.3% like-for-like increase in the value of the retail portfolio in South Africa.
Then, in Iberia (Spain and Portugal – for those who didn’t take geography), Castellana achieved like-for-like net operating income growth of 7.9%. Rental reversions were excellent at +9.1%, driving a like-for-like valuation increase of 6.6%. That’s a solid outcome when you consider the difficult macroeconomic environment in the developed world.
Vukile’s balance sheet is healthy, with a loan-to-value ratio of 38.4%. They make extensive use of green loans, with solar installations now generating 29% of electricity in the portfolio. The credit ratings for both Vukile and Castellana were recently upgraded as well.
When they need equity for growth, there’s no shortage of interest from investors. Vukile had no problems raising R2.8 billion in an oversubscribed equity issuance in May 2026 (i.e. after this reporting period). This enabled their entry into Italy, with Vukile’s European portfolio starting to sound like something out of a travel brochure!
For FY27, they are forecasting growth in funds from operations (FFO) per share of between 8% and 10%. By slightly increasing the dividend payout ratio, they expect to grow the dividend per share by between 10% and 12%.
Ghost Bite: Vukile is an excellent example of the high quality companies available on the JSE. The total return over 12 months (i.e. including the dividend) is 35%!
Results of previous poll:
Nibbles:
Director dealings:
A director of Nu-World (JSE: NWL) acquired shares worth R2.4 million.
An independent non-executive director of NEPI Rockcastle (JSE: NRP) bought shares worth R281k.
A person closely associated with the CEO of Sirius Real Estate (JSE: SRE) bought shares worth around R110k.
Powerfleet (JSE: PWR) has released results for the year ended March 2026. Although revenue was up 22%, they still reported a headline loss of $20.6 million vs. a loss of $51 million in the prior period. At least they were profitable at operating profit level, with positive $19.6 million vs. a loss of $25.9 million in the prior period. Like all good US-based tech companies, adjusted EBITDA went in the right direction, up by 44% to $97 million.
Brikor (JSE: BIK) released results for the year ended 28 February 2026. They are late, with the JSE having fired a warning shot a few days ago regarding this release not being on time. Revenue fell by 16.6% and they experienced a nasty swing from positive HEPS of 0.5 cents to a headline loss of 1.1 cents per share. They were impacted by weak demand in the bricks sector as well as lower coal production volumes. To give you an idea of how tough it is, the gross margin in the bricks segment was just 13.6% (vs. 29.2% in the prior period). Gross indeed! As a reminder, the board of Brikor is currently weighing up the delisting of the company.
Holders of 46.12% of Dipula (JSE: DIB) shares elected the dividend re-investment option. This allowed Dipula to retain R128.5 million in equity, as shares were issued to these investors in lieu of cash dividends. Property funds love these outcomes, as it’s like executing a little capital raise without going through nearly as much admin.
Advtech (JSE: ADH) has been busy with share repurchases. Between 30 March 2026 and 10 June 2026, they’ve invested R250 million in repurchasing 1.04% of shares in issue. The share price has been doing very well, up 42% over 12 months and 17% year-to-date.
Investec (JSE: INP | JSE: INP) announced that Fitch has upgraded their credit rating on long-term debt from BB- to BB, with a stable outlook. This is related to Fitch’s decision to upgrade South Africa’s sovereign debt earlier this month. When a country’s financials are in better shape, banks can access cheaper funding. These benefits then flow through the economy.
AB InBev (JSE: ANH) announced that existing independent director Dirk Van de Put has been appointed as the new Chairman of the Board, having already served on the board for three years. Interestingly, Van de Put is the current Chairman and CEO of Mondelez International. How does he find the time for this role as well?
There’s a change to the governance structure at MAS (JSE: MSP), with Martin Slabbert resigning as a director and Chairman of MAS and being appointed as Chairman of PKM Development (the joint venture company). This is after Mihail Vasilescu moved from Chairman of PKM Development to CEO of MAS. Dewald Joubert has been appointed as Chairman of MAS, stepping into that role from his current position as Lead Independent Non-Executive Director.
Clientèle (JSE: CLI) has confirmed that the final offer price is R19.90 per share. This will be structured as a dividend, so shareholders accepting the offer will need to take that into account in their tax considerations. Dividend tax of 20% will apply for shareholders who are not exempt from this tax.
Numeral (JSE: XII) has changed its classification on the Stock Exchange of Mauritius (SEM). They are moving to the Investments category, reflecting the plan to build a portfolio of business interests beyond the biotechnology, healthcare and pharmaceutical businesses. Essentially, this just gives them the flexibility to execute investments in a wider variety of sectors. The results for the year ended February 2026 are still in the audit process, with the SEM granting an extension until mid-July 2026 for their release.
A couple of companies are late in the release of their financial statements. Financials are supposed to be filed no more than three months after the end of a period. Mantengu (JSE: MTU) and Visual International (JSE: VIS) are in the naughty corner. For now, they are just on the radar of the JSE – the listings haven’t been suspended at this stage.
Oando (JSE: OAN) is still trying to get its 2025 financial statement released. They are falling behind, as the Q1 2026 numbers are also due. The delay is related to a regulatory review of the 2025 financials by the Financial Reporting Council of Nigeria.
In Season 2 of this podcast, The Finance Ghost talks to South African entrepreneurs about the ideas, choices and turning points behind building a business from scratch.
Listento the podcast:
What does it really take to build a business from nothing in South Africa? Founder of Universal Kitchens, Clinton Van Breda, shares the unfiltered story of how he dedicated two decades to turning a R500 000 loan into a business employing over 200 people.
There was no single breakthrough moment or overnight success. Instead, his story is one of discipline, reflection and relentless execution over two decades, driven by a strong sense of purpose.
From reviewing his diary line by line each year to making tough sacrifices early on (including skipping his honeymoon), Clinton reveals the mindset and habits that compound into long-term success.
This episode dives into the realities of entrepreneurship – the chaos, doubt and faith it demands. It also unpacks why focusing on the process, not the money, is what ultimately builds a lasting business.
Episode 2 covers:
Why there’s rarely a ‘big break’ and what actually drives growth
The power of daily reflection and disciplined execution
Building a family business without compromising long-term scalability
Why chasing money is the fastest way to lose focus
Lessons from growing a team to more than 200 employees
How to navigate uncertainty, risk and tough decisions
The difference between ‘cheap’ and ‘value’ when building a premium brand
The Finance Ghost plugged in with Capitec is made possible by the support of Capitec Business. All the entrepreneurs featured on this podcast are clients of Capitec. Capitec is an authorised Financial Services Provider, FSP number 46669.
Read the transcript:
The Finance Ghost: Welcome to this episode of The Finance Ghost plugged in with Capitec. This is episode two of season two, which means there are a number of shows for you to go back and listen to if you are new to this series. So please do go and do that. There are lots of great entrepreneurs to learn from.
And certainly today’s guest on the show is going to bring us some fantastic insights about building a business from scratch in South Africa. That is Clinton Van Breda, and he is the founder and CEO of Universal Kitchens.
Really impressive business. He’s been building it for roughly two decades. I’m excited to tap into that story.
So, Clinton, welcome to the show, and thank you for agreeing to do this.
Clinton Van Breda: Ghost, thanks for reaching out to me, and it’s quite an honour and a privilege. I’m actually emotional that people watch us, how we play out in business. I’m excited to chat about our journey.
The Finance Ghost: When we were getting to know each other a bit before this podcast, something you mentioned to me is that you started this business with roughly a R500,000 loan all those years ago.
We won’t disclose your turnover today, but you’ve got more than 200 staff. So I think that is a remarkable story, to go from basically half a million bucks in debt to get this thing off the ground, through to providing for 200 households. That is really, really impressive.
How often do you honestly just sit and think back to how everything started? Or is that so long ago now that you kind of forget about it and you just focus on what you need to do today, what you did last week, what’s coming next week?
What does a journey like that actually look like?
Clinton Van Breda: For any entrepreneur, regardless of his age, that’s starting a business, sometimes you don’t know how it will play out. And quite an interesting story I want to mention: I watched a video interview with the great Mr Christo Wiese. He said that sometimes us as entrepreneurs, in Afrikaans, he said that, “ons is van ons lotjies getik”.
What that means is, sometimes, if you as an entrepreneur start a business, if you know of all the challenges that you must face with your business, I don’t think you will take it on.
Whether that is a new business within your business or whether it is a new division, whatever it relates to within your business, making your business more profitable or innovative, bringing in new machinery. There are a lot of moving parts running a smooth-line business.
If you must think back at what you went through, and yet you did it, I think sometimes we as entrepreneurs, we’ve got a lot. Sometimes we’re “by our lotjie getik”: sometimes we’re mad.
And if I look back at where we are today, 20 years later, I would never have imagined that we would be where we are today.
And first of all, I would like to say to the Heavenly Father that I pray and believe in, that is giving me the wisdom and the courage and the empowerment, vision that is in me to take the business 20 years later and still have the drive and the passion of the business today.
I started off with my dad, and that played a big role. I started in a business household where my dad was a good entrepreneur. We discussed that I was supposed to be a golfer, and we all know how golf plays out. There was much more for me in a business career.
I started off with a R500,000 loan. I’ll never forget it. I still signed a cheque to one of our machine suppliers. I started off in an overdraft of minus R500,000. And today, with my wife being the financial director, we try and run the business in the smoothest possible way we can.
If I reflect back, from when we started till today, it’s a dream come true. But yet, I’m excited about what’s coming. I’ve met a lot of people within our business, and I’ve created many friends through the business.
The Finance Ghost: So, I think let’s go back to that beginning period and just unpack it a little bit more. You thought you might become a professional golfer. What you’ve alluded to there is that that’s the high-risk decision.
If you become Ernie Els or a Retief Goosen or any of the younger guys that we have today, then great. But obviously, if you spend your life on the Sunshine Tour, that’s a very hard way to actually make any kind of living. I guess that’s what drew you away from there.
Maybe just unpack a little bit more – that early journey with your dad, working in the business, some of the lessons learned there, and then how that actually led you to go and start what you’re doing today, which is Universal Kitchens?
Clinton Van Breda: I was a very young guy, and I was always good at rugby and cricket, and I had a lot of leadership in me. And I obviously wanted to become a professional golfer. I did my part. I’ve invested: eat, sleep, and played golf – that’s what I did. And obviously, each person’s life turns out differently.
So obviously I quickly decided, you know what, golf is not for me. And as I said, I was brought up in a household where there was always business with my dad. Through the ups and downs with him, I’ve learned a lot.
And I think when I decided that I wanted to do something myself, yet I didn’t know what to do. At that stage in my dad’s business career, he started building spec houses; building four or five houses a year on his own pace, doing his own finishes, etc.
And I thought I could run that side of the business for him, because he was originally in the aluminium industry, and there was family involved, and we took separate paths.
So my dad started building big estate projects, selling houses for R3 million-plus.
When I was on site, I saw the people doing his kitchens at that time. It drew my attention, and it was a clean job. It caught me, and probably the design of it, of how it looked. If you think about it, where the kitchen is the heart of the house, obviously, that caught my attention, and we started with it.
At that time, I was very young. I met my wife; we’re still married to this day. Blessed marriage, I will never forget it. My dad said, “Okay, right, well, now you need to buy yourself a bakkie.” I was 19 at that stage. I thought, jissee, I’m going to get a double-cab bakkie, or at least a club cab.
And my dad said, “No, no, no, you’re getting a long-wheelbase.” We call it a long horse. It was a Colt, bottom-range bakkie. It was a work bakkie. It was my church bakkie. At that time, I just met my girlfriend, my wife, now, and did it. I was focused on my goals.
Yes, we went through a lot in the business. I’ve restructured the business. It was exciting when I started.
The advice I can give is – I was really into it. I was dreaming about my business. I was visualising my business. How do I operate the next day?
I had a to-do list. I was not just coming in in the morning, whatever comes my way, take it, and leave at five or six o’clock at night. I was not very clever. I just focused on my end goal, and I did it.
The Finance Ghost: So Clinton, I think let’s start to dig into this journey of actually building this thing, because it’s been two decades. You’ve come out the other end with a really
substantial business that does some very interesting stuff.
And maybe just to touch on some of that, you’ve done some pretty big collaborations with celebrities. I mean, the website is beautiful. You’ve done a lot of really premium kitchens. The work looks amazing. And I’m so fascinated by how someone actually incrementally builds that bit by bit.
So you’ve touched on a few points there about how you basically eat, sleep, and live your business. I think that any business owner will fully understand what that is like. It does tend to take over your life. That also tends to be the case for a number of years.
When I worked in corporate advisory, a lot of the businesses that we would sell on behalf of people had often been around for about two decades. So where you are in your business journey now, is similar to where a lot of entrepreneurs, the really successful ones, get to. It takes, like I say, 20 years of work, which is an incredible journey.
And I just wanted to highlight one of my favourite quotes here. It’s by Brian Armstrong, the CEO of Coinbase. I’m not much of a crypto guy, but I definitely love this quote, which is: “Action produces information”. I first heard it on the Founders podcast with David Senra, which I highly, highly recommend. I’ll just say it again: “action produces information”.
What does that mean? It means that in order to figure out where to go, you basically just have to start moving. You have to start walking in a particular direction, and you’re going to learn some stuff along the way, and then you’ll know what to do next. One foot in front of the other.
Would you say that that has been your journey over the 20 years? Is it just incremental growth over time, or did you find that there was a really big bang moment? There was a particularly lucky break? Or was it more of a grind?
Clinton Van Breda: If I reflect on my journey so far, I was focused. Every year, I would start my year with my diary of the previous year, and I would go through each and every day in my hardboek diary (although my management moves in calendar sharing, etc).
I look at where I’ve maybe slipped up, or I reflect on a meeting that I’ve had. I start my new year diary with the things I’ve slipped up on. I will make notes of it, that’s to my importance, and I will then physically mark it down, and I will then run it through.
So, to get to the bottom of all this, we as entrepreneurs have a lot of plans. We wake up at night and think about this, think about that, and where I will take a day at a time and try to run through it or try and plan it.
Yes, our business has grown in such a big turnaround from a staff point of view, from a total business point of view. Our business has upscaled in the last five years.
I didn’t get a business breakthrough as such. I was just dedicated. I was goal-driven. I worked in my diary. I aligned myself with the right management team around me, making sure our marketing strategies were correct in certain time frames.
As we move in on our Cape Town market as well, more aggressively, I would pinpoint it and I would just run through it, whether it now takes a week or a month. I’m an executor. I don’t just leave things.
The Finance Ghost: It sounds like a bit of a snowball, right? You do a lot of things well for a long time, and then suddenly the business just takes off, it just starts to scale. You’ve alluded there it’s quite rapid growth in recent years.
I guess Covid would have helped, right? People were “staying home and staying safe” and they were spending a lot of money renovating their homes. Did you find that Covid was a really important boost for the business?
Clinton Van Breda: In 2020 Covid, that February was Covid, I think, or March lockdown. Prior to that, in November 2019, I signed a five-year lease in George with our first showroom we were expanding across the country, not just in Gauteng. And when I went through Covid, I was not anxious or I didn’t look around me, I was focused.
I know that that was a good area for us, and it still is today, that whole Garden Route area. As an entrepreneur, your brain switches on differently, your angle is different, and you think on your feet. I think way ahead of this in our A/B/C/D plans, which you must always have. Covid, we went through it. We had one of our brilliant years because we were active, we were alert.
The staff thought, “Are they going to lose their jobs?” There were a lot of things happening within the economy in all of South Africa and the whole world. In fact, no one knew what is going to play out. We were on the ball. After Covid, it was good, but we carried on as normal.
The Finance Ghost: So I have a really interesting question for you, actually. As I listen to this backstory, you’ve made it pretty clear that obviously, your faith is very important to you. A lot of it is just like getting on with it and just working towards that future and everything else.
Do you think that in the tough times, having strong faith, which is obviously a feature of your life, has helped you believe that actually, it’s all going to be okay?
And the reason I ask is that entrepreneurs will go through this crisis of confidence pretty often, right? Where something goes a little bit wrong in the business or something scary happens, like signing a lease ahead of this global pandemic, as you’ve described there.
And I guess you’ve got to have something that you cling to that lets you believe that long term it’s going to be okay. And maybe in some respects, that’s slightly easier if you are a person of faith. Then that’s what you would cling to.
Without going into the details of that, it’s more just an interesting thought experiment, which is to what extent do you believe that’s actually helped you to just keep your mindset where it needs to be?
Clinton Van Breda: Any entrepreneur that makes 100 calls-plus a day, I can’t make all the calls all the time that are right, or spot on. People will say: Clinton is born with a golden spoon in his mouth. It’s not that.
The faith, I don’t want to go too deep into it. But if you look at boxers, when does a trainer throw in a towel? When he’s really man down on the ground, and he’s got nowhere to go, then it’s when the trainer will throw in the towel.
You must make sure you surround yourself with the right people, that you don’t get distracted from your goals. Be quiet about your finances, your assets, etc. Be personal in your life, in your business, so that people can’t ruin it.
Be positive, don’t throw in a towel. It doesn’t matter what. Think through things. I don’t just make an impulsive decision. I will know what the right answer is, and I will know when to pull the trigger.
The Finance Ghost: I think it really comes down to purpose. For me personally, it’s my kids that probably get me out of bed in the morning. Well, sometimes literally, but certainly emotionally as well. To just understand that I’m building something bigger and providing for them helps.
And I think for entrepreneurs, you’ve got to make sure you have a purpose that goes beyond just, “Oh, I want to make money.” And for some people, it’s the purpose of actually just creating jobs and having all these families that are being supported.
And if you build a big enough business, as you’ve done, then that purpose actually starts to become a whole bunch of things. So thank you for sharing that. I think that’s really helpful.
Clinton Van Breda: Just to add to what you just said there, I think in any entrepreneurship, as you start, you think about money. When I started my business (and I will still today remind my children, my wife, my close family), when my wife and I got married, we didn’t go on honeymoon because it was crunch time. I’d just started my business. We only went in that December, when it was the builders’ holiday.
Your focus mustn’t be on the money, because if you’re going to focus on the money, you’re going to get many disappointments throughout. Look after the cents, and the rands will look after themselves. I do focus on the small things, but I’m not the kind of person who sits and calculates “how much did we make on this”.
There are checks and balances throughout, and as the business has grown as well, there are things that we do quarterly. I’m sitting at the moment in our De Waterkant showroom. As we started with the shop fitting, there was a small, little space.
We opened up a coffee shop, Manna Cafe by Universal Kitchens. It’s not about the money, it’s about the passion. It’s about how it came our way, and it’s just as if we’ve done coffee shops, and it is our first coffee shop!
I’m proud that my daughter is running this side of it, but it is so incorporated with our business and where we are, that it’s just amazing. It just came naturally our way. So I just wanted to mention that as well.
The Finance Ghost: So, Clinton, I know that this has really been built as a family business from the start, and I love that story about how you couldn’t go on honeymoon after you got married. Having an extremely supportive partner is one of the most important ingredients for any successful business. So kudos to you and your wife for achieving that along this tough journey. It’s very hard for entrepreneurs, and well done.
I know your kids are involved as well. So I guess you’ve always got to balance off building a family business versus building something that one day becomes a legacy business, where it survives you.
It gets other investors on board down the line potentially, or someone buys the whole thing. Those jobs are then secured going forward. And it sounds like that’s what you’ve done. If you’ve gotten to over 200 staff, then this business has certainly grown beyond you doing it all yourself every day.
How do you do that? Because that’s honestly the hardest thing for entrepreneurs. That’s the struggle that is so consistent, is: “How do I build a business from just me, through to just me and some trusted people, and then into something that someone can actually come along and potentially invest in?”
What would you say has been your biggest learning and your approach to doing that?
Clinton Van Breda: I started this business, and I’ve grown it, and I still do. And I’m still passionate.
My daughter is now in first-year interior design. She’s in Stellenbosch. My son finished matric last year. He’s already slowly but surely getting involved in the business from a groundwork point of view. And obviously, my wife runs the finances, and then we’ve got a lot of other staff that’s also family.
So at the end of the day, I don’t sit back and say, right, I’ve built up this business. Who’s there to invest in us? We play the game, and I take things on. Recently did De Waterkant, which is a brilliant showroom, after 18 months.
We’ve got the Joburg showroom. We’ve got our head office factories in Boksburg, where we manufacture 90% of our things. The George showroom. We’ve got a George factory as well. And then we’ve got a Paarl showroom, and then we’ve recently opened up our factory in Malmesbury. We’re also going to start manufacturing that side.
The family knows where they are within the business, and they know where my head is going. They support me 100%. Whoever comes along and knocks on my door, we will address it, and we’ll take it as it comes.
The Finance Ghost: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. It’s a difficult thing to get right, but you obviously have achieved a degree of scale there. Congratulations on doing that.
I know that part of that would have been the marketing strategy, and it’s something you alluded to earlier, is that marketing has been quite an important driver of the story for you.
So maybe just talk to us a little bit about the brand collaborations you’ve done with local celebs. I know you’ve done some interesting stuff on TV. To what extent has that played a role in the success of the business?
Clinton Van Breda: Minki van der Westhuizen was our brand ambassador for four years, and we’ve really reached out in her market. We’ve tapped into her audience, and we actually became friends through the journey. Even her husband, Ernst Joubert. They’re good people. Once a year we recap. We didn’t even have a real contract in place because we trust one another and honour her for what she did for our brand.
We’ve done a lot of other things with other celebs. Bok van Blerk. Yeah, there were so many. We’re chatting to a few rugby players as well.
I make sure that we align ourselves with the right audience, the right people.
I was very lucky in a way that I’ve got a lot of networks and a lot of resources from the years of doing business. We are busy in negotiations, signing up a new brand ambassador.
I don’t rush it. If it comes, it comes. If it doesn’t, then we move on. We do what we need to do.
The Finance Ghost: Let’s talk about some of the business history you’ve got with Capitec. And I know that you banked with Mercantile for many years before Capitec went and acquired Mercantile and turned that into Capitec Business.
My understanding is you were actually quite involved in that process, even. So perhaps just talk to us a little bit about the importance of having the right financial backing for what you’re doing. And the extent to which the access to the services that a bank will bring you has really made a difference to what you’ve built.
Clinton Van Breda: I’m not a very clever person. I’ve learned the hard ways also and the good ways, and I’m a very loyal person, to such an extent that only now that I’ve been here four months more permanently, I’ve now got a barber that actually cuts my hair.
If I go to a barber, he is my go-to. If I buy a certain brand car, like we love Toyota as our dailies, I will buy from one dealership. That’s the same with my CA. Our company CA has been with us for 15 years. Gerhard van Graan.
Mercantile Bank, we’ve banked with them. It was very well known as a small business centre or bank. It was a Portuguese bank. I had a manager there looking after our account by the name Johann Kraft, still today with Capitec, in a very senior role. He guided me through business, through how we must look at our financial obligations, our management accounts.
I didn’t even know about management accounts back at that time. I was not worried about all the bank boxes etcetera. I was just driven. I knew I must pay VAT over, and there we play the game. I was not worried about that because I knew that it would be sorted out.
Johann Kraft, with my company CA, really nurtured me and played a huge role in today’s business climate that we are in, to understand the financial side of the business. Provisional tax, your VAT. There are so many things that play a role. And with Mercantile at that time, we were very small, but they were still willing to do it.
Capitec bought over Mercantile, and through the process, my wife and I, we went into a panic stage because we were used to Mercantile’s banking online. We were used to who we speak to when we buy an HP vehicle or order a machine.
We had a meeting, and Capitec explained the process to me, and I could actually understand why they did the deal: to get into the business sector more aggressively.
Through the Capitec process, I also realised that I look at Capitec Business, as we are standing today, as actually my business partners. Truly. We make sure we’re transparent with them, with our financial statements, our management accounts on a quarterly basis.
We really try and make their lives easy so that when we need to buy a machine (we’ve just imported machines now, for a few million) it’s not a blink of an eye. It was a few emails up and down.
And within 24 hours, we got approval. We bought a building in Boksburg. They backed me, and they are my business partners. They’re there to look after me, and I’m there to look after them. Yes, they make their money, but it’s not an issue for me. We show the growth because we’ve got a business bank that’s actually involved in our business.
I talk weekly with Jack Neethling, who’s my manager. And whether we talk around a coffee or just over the phone, we’ve become close. I can see the Capitec guys, they know what they are doing. They get involved in the business. They know my business. They back my brand.
Sometimes I must give a little bit more of an explanation to them or a business plan on where we are and where we’re going, etc. And they back us 100%.
I can only do so much. We invest in our own business as well, but so does Capitec. So I’m grateful for that.
The Finance Ghost: Just a final question from me. Any advice you’ve got for people listening to this who might be thinking of taking on some kind of kitchen renovation project? Obviously, that’s your bread and butter.
And unfortunately, this industry has a reputation for having a lot of contractors who are nowhere near as ethical as the way that you do business. So what sort of advice would you give people to help protect them from that situation?
Clinton Van Breda: It always boils down to “goedkoop koop is duurkoop”. What that means in English is, don’t try and get the cheapest possible quote for your kitchen. There’s a lot that entails us doing our work professionally.
For example, our 3D designs, our renders. It’s what we showcase to our clients from the first appointment or the second appointment when they come to our showroom. It includes their kitchen or bedroom cupboards, walk-in closets, wine cellars, their bathroom vanities, studies, and wall cladding.
We do all the joinery within the house. And if they come to our showroom to look at it, that’s an important part. We pay a lot of money monthly, nationally, for all my staff, all my designers to have that program, but it’s the best program available. Yes, we can go and save cost and get cheaper designing programs out there, but we use the best.
The hardware we use is the best. I know it. I was in Austria myself. They invited me to Austria to their headquarters in Germany and Austria.
So I make sure that all our suppliers are aligned with our vision and what we stand for on quality and on service. It’s very important. And all that boils down to an end result price because there are so many hands that go through the process and there are so many things that are happening.
In five years’ time or in 10 years’ time, you must pick up the phone and say, listen here, there’s something wrong with my kitchen. And Universal Kitchens will be there because we honour – we say what we do, and we do what we say. I live for that. My people, my staff know the client comes first, always. The client must be happy. You pay for that at the end of the day.
My personal involvement in the business, my phone number is all over the media, and it’s on our website, etc. Search on Google for Clinton Van Breda. We’re transparent. We’ve got an open mandate, and we try to keep to that.
It’s not easy to deal with people and staff. There’s a lot of moving parts. But we try our best, and we communicate with our clients. And I feel that’s priceless. If I look at my personal life and I deal with business people, I will pay the premium of buying something from someone I know and I can trust, and I know my money is safe. And I know if he says tomorrow, it’s tomorrow.
If I want to go for the cheapest, I don’t know if my money is safe. I don’t know how they operate. There’s nothing to reference back to me.
People tend to just go for the cheapest. And I always say to the market and to everyone, and even with our staff today on our quarterly trainings with our sales staff, I say, “Remember guys, we as Universal Kitchens, we’ve got a national footprint”.
We try to do bespoke work. So we really try to take your investment or your budget into consideration, and build your design, of the look and the feeling, around that. We can manufacture a 3-Series BMW, a 5-Series BMW or a 7-Series BMW.
Where do you want to fit in? We don’t just want to sell the 7-Series, because there’s a place for a 3-Series. So we’ve made sure within our business that we don’t cater just for the 7-Series BMWs.
We actually take your budget into consideration, and when we do the consultation process, we guide you.
The Finance Ghost: Clinton, thank you so much for your time today, and just congratulations on everything that you’ve built. All the best for the future and all that it brings to you.
I’ll include some links to Universal Kitchens in the show notes so that people can go and find it and see what you’re all about. No doubt they’ll find you on the socials as well. And all the best for the future.
Clinton Van Breda: Thanks, Ghost, and thanks for the opportunity. And please watch us. There are many more to come, many more exciting things. Thanks.
Real stories and real people. Yours could be next. Plugged In with Capitec. Capitec is an authorised financial services provider, FSP 4669.
Clientèle shareholders give the green light to the offer and delisting transactions
Profitability at Crookes Brothers has collapsed
KAP: an unexpected boost from the Middle East conflict
Mantengu is looking to dispose of Blue Ridge Platinum
Novus has plenty of work to do in its business
Vunani swings into profits
Vodacom gave YeboYethu a great year
Clientèle shareholders give the green light to the offer and delisting transactions (JSE: CLI)
The deal is now much closer to meeting all conditions
Financial services group Clientèle is a big step closer to adding its name to the list of companies that have delisted from the JSE due to a stubbornly low valuation.
After an offer and proposed delisting was announced at the end of April this year, the circular was released in mid-May and the meeting was scheduled for 12th June. At that meeting, shareholders voted strongly in favour of the various resolutions required to execute the transaction.
The remaining condition relates to maximum acceptances. When the deal was announced, it looked like Clientèle had irrevocables in place to make sure that this condition would be met. There’s a difference between having irrevocable undertakings and actually achieving the condition though, so investors will have to wait until later this month to know for sure that everything is going ahead.
Ghost Bite: Assuming all goes as planned, the payment date of 29 June will see shareholders (who accepted the offer) paid R19.90 per share. It’s a discount to embedded value, but it’s also significantly higher than the range of R14.00 – R17.00 that the share was stuck in for months before the offer was announced.
Profitability at Crookes Brothers has collapsed (JSE: CKS)
This is another reminder of how tough the agri sector is
Crookes Brothers is one of the very few companies on the JSE that offer exposure to the primary agriculture sector. This is an extraordinarily volatile way to make money, as Mother Nature can be cruel and unpredictable.
The latest numbers prove once more that farming isn’t a guaranteed route to riches. For the year ended March 2026, Crookes Brothers saw its HEPS collapse spectacularly, down by between 93% and 99%!
This leaves them with HEPS of between 2.35 cents and 27.85 cents vs. 425.1 cents in the comparable period. There’s very little trade in the stock, so the share price decline of 27% over the past 12 months probably isn’t the best example of price discovery in action. There’s also an element of the market looking through the wild swings and taking a more moderate approach to the valuation.
The company attributes this decline to lower earnings across all segments. Sugar prices are under pressure, land sales have been delayed and the Macadamia segment is also struggling, as evidenced by a capital impairment of around R256 million in that business. Remember that the impairment isn’t a cash item and is excluded from HEPS, so it’s just an indicator of how tough things are in the underlying business.
Ghost Bite: Farming is an extremely difficult industry. It sits way beyond my personal risk tolerance levels.
KAP: an unexpected boost from the Middle East conflict (JSE: KAP)
Safripol has been helped tremendously by fewer imports
It’s great to see KAP’s earnings moving in the right direction for once. This group tends to always have a headache or two to worry about, leading to a disappointing outcome for investors.
The share price might be up 43% year-to-date, but the total return over 5 years is -28% (yes, including dividends)!
As KAP is a useful barometer for the “real” economy in South Africa, I would love to see a more consistent positive performance from them.
FY26 looks a lot better, with the performance for the 11 months to May 2026 giving the group confidence to indicate that HEPS for the full year will increase by more than 50%.
The base effect is important here. FY25 was awful, with the ramp-up of PG Bison’s new MDF line and major challenges in the local vehicle OEM market. We can confirm this simply by looking at FY24, when KAP generated HEPS of 45.3 cents before plunging to 24.1 cents in FY25.
This means that FY26 is best framed as a partial recovery year. But that’s still a big step in the right direction.
We must touch on Safripol first, as this is arguably the trickiest part of the group for investors to consider. Global overcapacity is a structural issue, with such cheap imports being available that Safripol had to execute two commercial shutdowns at the PET plant in Durban. The sudden improvement in fortunes is thanks to the Middle East conflict, as it reduced imports and improved polymer prices. The second half mitigated some of the pain in the first half, but this doesn’t address the underlying structural risks.
PG Bison increased volumes and made progress in redirecting sales towards higher margin markets. They describe both revenue and operating profit as being “meaningfully higher” than in the prior period. This is a critical growth area for the group, as they’ve increased production capacity by 33% and need to deliver returns on that capex.
Unitrans has been focused on profits rather than revenue, with deliberate decisions to move away from lower margin activities. Although revenue was down, they describe operating profit as having increased “meaningfully”. They believe that there is still room to go here to improve the performance at Unitrans.
Feltex enjoyed an increase in domestic new vehicle assembly volumes. There were also major problems in the base period that didn’t repeat in this financial period, including operational constraints at two local OEMs and the costs of a model changeover. Revenue and operating profit were both higher this year, albeit with a slowdown in the second half relative to the first half.
Sleep Group is the headache this time around, with subdued customer demand and only a marginal increase in revenue despite higher marketing costs. This resulted in a moderate decline in profits.
Optix feels like a chronic problem rather than a headache you can fix with some pills. Although they grew subscriptions, there were lower hardware sales and thus revenue actually declined. Having invested in sales, the operating loss has now increased vs. the prior period.
KAP would do themselves a favour by getting out of Optix. It’s beyond me why that business is even in this group. It just confuses investors and usually has a negative impact on profits as well.
On the balance sheet, management’s target is a net debt reduction of R500 million for FY26. They are plannning a further reduction in FY27, but they didn’t give any specifics.
Ghost Bite: The Middle East situation gave Safripol a very helpful boost. But this is clearly not a structural improvement, and it doesn’t address the risk of imports returning with a vengeance once things normalise. The share price has rallied strongly in recent months, but KAP still has tons of work to do to start delivering consistent earnings growth to investors.
Mantengu is looking to dispose of Blue Ridge Platinum (JSE: MTU)
This is in anticipation of the potential Averi Finance transaction
Mantengu is currently working towards the large Averi Finance transaction that was announced in May. They are happy to streamline the group in the meantime though, including the potential disposal of Blue Ridge Platinum.
The deal isn’t guaranteed at this stage, but Mantengu has received an offer from Afresources Mining for the entire shareholding and related claims in Blue Ridge. The offeror is not a related party to Mantengu.
If my understanding of the announcement is correct, the offer values 100% of Blue Ridge at R50 million. Mantengu has a 70% stake in the asset.
This would be a Category 2 transaction, so shareholders wouldn’t be asked to vote.
Ghost Bite: It was only a year ago that Mantengu was singing the praises of this asset. Times have certainly changed at the company.
Novus has plenty of work to do in its business (JSE: NVS)
Especially with the Mustek distraction almost out of the way
With Novus having run the regulatory gauntlet and come out the other end with a controlling stake of 50.39% in Mustek (JSE: MST), management (and the market) will be able to pay more attention to the rest of the Novus group.
Importantly, the stake in Mustek was only 39.96% at the end of this reporting period, so Novus equity accounted earnings of R26.4 million. Going ahead, they will no doubt account for Mustek on a consolidated basis, especially as they still need to complete the mandatory offer to Mustek shareholders.
The rest of the Novus group needs some love, as performance wasn’t encouraging in the year ended March 2026. Revenue was down 0.7% and adjusted EBITDA was down by 15.2%. To give you a sense of the operating leverage at play here, revenue dipped by R27 million and adjusted EBITDA was down R101 million!
Diluted HEPS is the right metric to consider here, as there are share conversions coming down the line in relation to the Maskew Miller Learning deal. This metric was down 4.4% to 76.59 cents.
Despite the earnings pressure, Novus followed the textbook approach of putting the dividend ahead of everything else. They kept it at 55 cents per share.
If we dig into the divisions, the Print, Publishing & Distribution division increased revenue by 6.8% and operating profit fell by 28.6%. This was despite an improvement in gross margin in this business. I must also note that the divisional performance was skewed by the Publishing & Distribution side being included for the full 12 months vs. just 5 months in the prior year. If you isolate the Print side, revenue was down by 9.9%.
The Education business is looking increasingly like a problem, with revenue down by 18.1% after orders from provincial departments were below expectations. Although adjusted operating profit managed to tick up by 4.4%, this was mainly due to reduced amortisation on intangible assetss.
The Packaging segment saw revenue fall by 5.1%. Thanks to an increase in gross margin, adjusted operating profit increased by 8.9%.
The highlight here is the increase in the closing cash balance from R812 million to almost R1.02 billion. There were improved net working capital inflows in the Print and Education segments as they collected debtors. The net cash increase at year-end was all earmarked for the Mustek deal, so they’ve effectively turned better working capital into a new investment!
Ghost Bite: With numbers like these, I’m not surprised that the share price has been under pressure. Novus will need to show the market a much better story in FY26 if they hope to drive a higher Price/Earnings multiple.
Vunani swings into profits (JSE: VUN)
Full details will be available later this month
Vunani has released a trading statement dealing with the year ended 28 February 2026. There’s very good news for investors, as the company has moved from a loss-making position into profitability.
HEPS is expected to be between 10.9 cents and 11.5 cents, a huge improvement over the headline loss per share of -2.8 cents in the previous period.
The share is trading at R2.00, so there’s still an unrealistically high P/E multiple at play here. But at least earnings have moved in the right direction.
Ghost Bite: It’s always important to wait for detailed results before jumping to any major conclusions about performance. The results are due for release on 23 June.
Vodacom gave YeboYethu a great year (JSE: YYLBEE)
In this case, financial leverage has worked in favour of the structure
YeboYethu is the Vodacom (JSE: VOD) B-BBEE structure. Its only asset is an investment in listed Vodacom shares. This means that the net asset value of the fund changes every single day based the observable price of Vodacom shares.
The value of the debt in the structure (in this case structured as two classes of preference shares) ticks up based on the funding rate attached to those instruments. At YeboYethu, the Class A shares are priced at 68% of prime and the Class B shares are at 70% of prime.
For tax reasons, preference shares are priced as a discount to prime that is usually in line with the effective tax rate. You can essentially think of this as being comparable to traditional debt priced roughly at the prime rate.
Borrowing money to buy shares is risky, but that’s how these B-BBEE structures were all historically structured (to allow for participants who don’t have deep pockets to invest in shares).
The end result? A volatile net asset value in a highly leveraged structure. When Vodacom does well, YeboYethu does extremely well. Conversely, when the Vodacom share price suffers, YeboYethu gets an amplified version of that pain.
The year ended March 2026 is an example of the former, as Vodacom’s share price increased by 15% between March 2025 and March 2026. This is well ahead of the prime lending rate, so the underlying net asset value in YeboYethu increased by a juicy 42%.
Due to the extent of debt, dividends in these structures tend to increase by a more consistent rate. YeboYethu’s final dividend grew by 5%.
Ghost Bite: Analysing these structures is actually more complicated than the underlying shares, as you need a view on Vodacom and then on the balance sheet of YeboYethu itself. More effort could go into actually explaining these economics properly to the market, particularly as these structures are focused on including investors with limited capital and experience.
Results of previous poll:
Nibbles:
Director dealings:
A director of AVI (JSE: AVI) received share awards and sold the whole lot worth R7.8 million.
An independent non-executive director of Pepkor (JSE: PPH) bought shares worth R397k.
A director of a subsidiary of Santova (JSE: SNV) sold shares worth R160k.
A prescribed officer of Advtech (JSE: ADH) sold shares worth R51k.
AngloGold Ashanti (JSE: ANG) wants to move forward with the previously announced share repurchase programme of up to $2 billion. Shareholders need to approve it before that happens, with the meeting scheduled for 23 July. The current market cap is R705 billion, so this share buyback would be for roughly 4.5% of shares in issue.
A new board has been constituted at RMB Holdings (JSE: RMH). The market already knew that the existing directors were planning to stand down in the aftermath of the AttBid offer. The new CEO is Gideon Oosthuizen, with Adriaan van Rooyen joining as CFO – both from Atterbury Property Group. The three independent non-executives are Andrew Brooking (of Java Capital fame), Nicolaas Kruger (ex-CEO of Momentum Metropolitan) and Dr Pine Pienaar (a highly experienced engineer).
There’s a significant change in the shareholder register of Insimbi Industrial Holdings (JSE: ISB). New Seasons Equity Fund has sold its entire stake in the company. An investment entity called Sugarfields Fund I has bought a 30.41% stake, so they are going straight to a level that is only a few percentage points below the threshold for a mandatory offer! The director representing New Seasons Equity Fund has also resigned from the board. A replacement non-executive director hasn’t been named as yet, but it’s likely that it would be a Sugarfields Fund representative.
Trustco (JSE: TTO) has received a demand to call a shareholders’ meeting from Riskowitz Capital Management. There’s clearly still no love lost between the board and that investor, with the agenda for the proposed meeting being to appoint a new board of directors. The board is considering the content and validity of the demand and will make a further announcement in due course.
Sebata Holdings (JSE: SEB) released results for the year ended March 2025. Yes, they really are that far behind in their financial reporting. If you can believe it, HEPS swung from a loss of 102.20 cents to a profit of 100.66 cents! The swing in the numbers is thanks to the company regaining 100% control of the software and water divisions, with effect from 1 July 2024. They previously held 40% in these assets.
Thomas Edison wanted to own American film. Instead, through essentially operating a cartel, he drove it 5,000 kilometres west and gave the world Hollywood.
In 1886, a devout couple from Kansas bought 49 hectares of farmland northwest of Los Angeles and named it Hollywood. Their dream was to grow figs and build a sober, God-fearing community of like-minded Christians. It is one of history’s better jokes that this particular patch of earth would instead become the global byword for vice, glamour, and manufactured dreams… and that the man most responsible for its transformation never wanted it to happen.
That man was Thomas Edison. And to understand how the inventor of the light bulb accidentally founded the movie capital of the world, we have to start with a running horse.
A racehorse, a shutter, and the birth of an industry
In 1872, photographer Eadweard Muybridge (yes, that’s the right spelling) was determined to help the governor of California, Leland Stanford, with an irritating problem. Stanford owned a racehorse and wanted it photographed in motion, but was frustrated that every picture taken of the horse failed to capture its speed clearly. The primitive cameras of that age could only translate a galloping horse’s legs into motion blur. Muybridge experimented with faster mechanical shutters for his camera, and eventually set up a row of 12 cameras next to the racetrack. The result was not just one clear image of a running horse, but a sequence of 12.
Inspired by his results, Muybridge loaded the images into a device he called a zoopraxiscope (essentially a hand-cranked round projector) and with the turn of a handle, shattered the wall between still and moving images.
Muybridge’s trick of stitching stillness into motion sent inventors everywhere scrambling to build devices that could do the same thing better.
Thomas Edison, characteristically, was among the first to get there. But here it’s worth pausing on who Edison actually was, because the popular image we have of the man – kindly genius, friend to mankind, the man who lit up the world – is really only half the story.
The other half
Thomas Alva Edison was a titan of invention, and that’s not an overstatement. The phonograph, the motion picture camera and the electric light bulb all came out of his laboratories and reshaped the industrialised world. He more or less invented the modern research lab itself, gathering teams of researchers under one roof in Menlo Park, New Jersey. By the end of his life he held 1,093 US patents.
All that success was not won by being a pushover. Edison was shrewd, fiercely competitive and, by most accounts, not someone you wanted as an enemy.
Some of the texture of his character showed up early. At the age of 15, he saved a child from being struck by a runaway train. The child’s father was so grateful that he trained Edison as a telegraph operator. Edison began working as a telegrapher in a local general store before moving to Stratford Junction, Ontario, where he worked as a night telegrapher for the Grand Trunk Railway.
As a night telegrapher, he was supposed to be awake and alert. Instead, he would tire himself out by running chemistry experiments on the job and then sleeping through his shifts. After causing a near-collision of two trains, he decided it was time to put the telegraph behind him and set his sights on something bigger. The boy who cut corners on the night shift would grow into a man with a very particular attitude toward rules.
The camera and the prize behind it
Decades of invention and reinvention passed. By 1888, Edison had established himself as a household name and made a fortune in the process. While running an experimental mining operation, his mind turned to moving pictures. He set his employee William Kennedy Laurie Dickson (a miner who happened to be a gifted photographer) to work on a machine that would “do for the eye what the phonograph does for the ear”.
Edison handled the electromechanical side, while Dickson did the hard optical and film work. By 1891 they had a working prototype (publicly demonstrated that May) and eventually a patent for the motion picture camera Edison called the Kinetograph. Edison’s name went on it, but most of the actual credit (historians agree) belonged to Dickson. This is a pattern that would repeat multiple times over the course of Edison’s life.
But the camera wasn’t even the prize Edison wanted. His real obsession was synchronised sound. He dreamed of a machine that would record picture and audio together and play them back in unison. Dickson shot the first sound film, starring himself, in the spring of 1890. But keeping picture and sound aligned proved maddeningly difficult, and Edison, ever the businessman, shelved the concept.
Instead he built the Kinetoscope, a peephole viewer that let one person at a time watch a short, silent film for a penny, and installed the machines in arcades.
By this point he had invented the camera and the “screen”, but what about the content? Well, naturally Edison had an answer for that too. In 1893, he built America’s first film studio in New Jersey – a cramped, tar-papered black box that the staff nicknamed “Black Maria”. Out of it came nearly 1,200 short films featuring acrobats, parades, a fire crew answering a call, a man sneezing (Fred Ott’s Sneeze, 1894), a couple kissing (The Kiss, 1896), and eventually the first-ever Frankenstein film in 1910.
Edison had not just helped invent the movie camera. He had built the first factory for making movies. He was, for a brief moment, the entire American film industry.
And he intended to keep it that way.
The Trust and the men with the lead pipes
In 1908, Edison gathered the major patent holders in the budding film industry into a single conglomerate: the Motion Picture Patents Company, known to everyone as the Edison Trust.
On paper it was nine studios pooling their patents. In practice it was a cartel with a chokehold on every essential piece of the filmmaking process, from cameras to raw film stock. If you wanted to make a movie in America, you went through Edison, or you got buried in lawsuits. Universal Studios alone fielded 289 separate legal complaints.
Where the courts weren’t enough, the Trust got creative. The MPPC was not above hiring mobsters to pay visits to filmmakers working outside its blessing, intimidating them and destroying their cameras. The courts of the eastern United States, meanwhile, seemed perfectly content to enforce the monopoly. Edison had become the king of the movies, and he ruled the way kings often do: with lawyers in the front and muscle in the back.
How to escape a king
If you were an independent filmmaker around 1910, working with equipment you technically had no right to use, New York was hostile territory. It sat right next to Edison’s headquarters and crawled with his agents, who had a habit of showing up to seize or destroy cameras mid-shoot.
Los Angeles, by contrast, had everything a fugitive industry could want. The weather allowed year-round filming. The landscape offered deserts, mountains, ocean, and ranchland within a day’s drive, so a studio could fake almost any setting on Earth. Land was cheap, labour was mostly non-union, and locals threw incentives at anyone willing to set up shop. As an added bonus, Californian courts seemed less enthusiastic about Edison’s filmmaking monopoly and less likely to blindly sway in his favour.
The pioneers trickled in and then poured. William Selig opened a studio in Echo Park in 1909. In 1911, a New Jersey producer named David Horsley founded the first studio inside the little farming hamlet that the fig-farming Wilcoxes had named Hollywood. Others stampeded after him, clustering together into what they called a “movie colony”. A rural community of 5,000 souls in 1910 swelled to 35,000 by 1920. By 1915, three out of every five American films were being made in Hollywood.
The king dethroned
The monopoly didn’t last either. In 1913, William Fox joined the owners of Paramount and Universal in bringing a complaint to the US government, arguing that the Edison Trust violated the Sherman Anti-Trust Act. The government agreed. In 1915 the court found that the MPPC was an illegal conspiracy in restraint of trade, and in 1917 the Supreme Court ordered it disbanded entirely. The cartel was broken, but by then the damage, from Edison’s point of view, was permanent. The filmmakers he had hounded out of New York had built something almost 5,000 kilometres away that no patent could touch.
That’s the story of how Thomas Edison – genius inventor, but also patent bully, monopolist, and employer of hired thugs – was probably the single biggest individual influence on the existence of Hollywood as we know it. Had he been a more generous man, a fairer competitor, or simply content to share the industry he helped create, there’s a good chance the film capital of the world would today be a stretch of West Orange, New Jersey, and Hollywood would be just another sleepy suburb of Los Angeles, perhaps still growing figs.
About the author: Dominique Olivier
Dominique Olivier uses her love of storytelling and ideation to help brands solve problems.
Her first book, Lessons from Loss, has been published by Penguin Random House.
She is a weekly columnist in Ghost Mail and collaborates with The Finance Ghost on Ghost Mail Weekender, a Sunday publication designed to help you be more interesting.
Good news from Master Drilling: there’s a dividend
MC Mining is raising debt from two shareholders
A small decline in earnings at Novus
Trematon has found a buyer for Generation Education
Alexforbes posts single-digit growth (JSE: AFH)
The underlying asset growth is far more exciting than profits
Alexforbes released results for the year ended March 2026. HEPS from continuing operations increased by just 2.8%, while the dividend was up by 4%. When the payout ratio has a bit of wiggle room, companies will try hard to avoid a disappointing dividend story.
HEPS as reported was down 5%, while normalised HEPS was flat. There are clearly a few complexities at play here.
Before we touch on the detailed results, it’s worth reminding you just how enormous this group is. The umbrella fund alone has assets under management of R197.7 billion. Total group assets increased by 22% to R733.2 billion!
The institutional business is by far the biggest slice of the assets, although retail assets under management increased by 21% to R112.3 billion. I get a kick from seeing that the retail segment generated a 32.7% increase in normalised profit before tax. The strength of retail investors should never be underestimated!
Despite these substantial growth rates in assets, operating income (defined as revenue less direct expenses) only grew by 10%. Operating expenses were up 9%, so they locked in a small margin uplift. An IFRS 16 adjustment was a major pressure point in expenses, so the underlying margin improvement is better than these numbers may suggest.
But between operating profit and HEPS, there are clearly a few things that moved against the group. One was normalised investment income, which fell from R229 million to R184 million. Another issue was an increase in the effective tax rate. Once those are taken into account, profit from continuing operations was up by 9%.
A sharp fall in profits from discontinued operations completely wiped out this growth, leading to perfectly flat normalised profit for the year. You need to be careful here though, as this relates to insurance businesses that are no longer in operation.
So, in this case, working with profit from continuing operations is probably the right approach. But of course, it’s even safer to work with the HEPS number, especially as this also adjusts for non-controlling interests and other factors. As mentioned, HEPS from continuing operations was up by just 2.8%, so Alexforbes is struggling to turn a strong increase in assets into meaningful growth for investors.
Ghost Bite: I like investing in simple businesses where it’s clear how revenue growth makes its way down the income statement. Alexforbes doesn’t fall into that category. With the share price down 17% in the past year, the market isn’t exactly rushing to buy this stock either.
Good news from Master Drilling: there’s a dividend (JSE: MDI)
But the underlying reason is the bigger highlight
When Master Drilling released their year ended December 2025 results back in March, they took the cautious approach of not declaring a dividend. The conflict in Iran was very fresh, so they weren’t sure how the oil price spike and other issues would play through the system.
At the time, they acknowledged that if things turned out better than expected, then a special dividend would be on the cards. The good news for shareholders is that a dividend of R0.40 per share has been declared.
It’s small in the context of the share price of R17.43, so it’s more of a delayed ordinary dividend than a special dividend in the traditional sense. Most special dividends are a function of excess cash on the balance sheet.
The underlying narrative is the most encouraging part of this update, as the decision to pay the dividend is based on all key initiatives progressing as scheduled.
Ghost Bite: The mining sector is clearly behaving as though the oil spike will pass. It always does, as the world doesn’t function very well at high oil prices. The sooner it drops back down, the better!
MC Mining is raising debt from two shareholders (JSE: MCZ)
Welcome to the world of mezzanine finance
MC Mining has announced a $9.94 million debt capital raise in the form of unsecured convertible promissory notes. The investors are Kinetic Development Group (the controlling shareholder) and Eagle Canyon International (a minority shareholder).
Kinetic will subscribe for $6.14 million in notes and Eagle Canyon is signing up for $3.8 million.
The capital will of course be used for the Makhado hard coking coal project, which is the only asset that anyone really cares about at MC Mining.
The notes mature after just one year of being issued. They may be converted into shares at $0.2089 per share. At current exchange rates, that’s around R3.40 per share vs. the current spot price of R3.28.
Shareholders will need to approve this transaction, with a circular to be sent out in due course. The conversion price seems pretty fair to me under the circumstances, with holders of 25% of MC Mining’s voting shares already acknowledging that they will vote in favour of the raise.
Ghost Bite: As I’ve written many times, the only guarantee in the world of junior mining is that your stake will be diluted over time. There are many different ways that this happens in practice, but it’s the inevitable outcome of a company needing to raise capital in creative ways to get a project across the line.
A small decline in earnings at Novus (JSE: NVS)
Detailed results should be available before the weekend
Novus has released a trading statement for the year ended March 2026. It doesn’t give us any operational detail unfortunately, but it does confirm that HEPS will be down by between 0% and 8% for the period.
One of the contributing factors is the impairment of a related party loan of R19.9 million. We will have to wait for detailed results to know for sure what has happened at the company.
Separately, Mustek (JSE: MST) confirmed via SENS that Novus now has 50.39% in the company. This is outright control.
In case you’re wondering, it’s possible to control a company with a smaller stake, as no shareholder meeting ever has 100% attendance. But once you tip the scale over 50%, there’s no debate around it anymore: you control the company.
The only thing you aren’t guaranteed to get across the line is a special resolution, which needs 75% approval. This is where you’ll often see the impact of concert parties and voting arrangements that include the controlling shareholder. The true voting power of a controlling shareholder can be much higher than the direct stake suggests.
Ghost Bite: It’s been a regulatory process of note to get to this point. Novus will now need to show growth to its investors, as the share price is down 26% over 12 months.
Trematon has found a buyer for Generation Education (JSE: TMT)
As expected, it’s an impact fund
Trematon has previously told the market that they are looking to sell the Generation Education business. Full details are now available, with a category 1 circular on the way.
The price on the table is R172 million and the buyer is the Education Investment Impact Fund of South Africa, which is managed by Old Mutual Alternative Investments.
The buyer has more than just a profit motive, as the mandate includes a desire to improve the quality of education in South Africa. This is practically a prerequisite for school assets these days, as the low birth rate has stripped growth out of the sector.
In the announcement, Trematon acknowledges that Generation has not lived up to growth expectations. This despite the school group being focused on the Western Cape, where there has been a population explosion. The model may simply be too niche to reach the scale required to generate economic returns.
To be clear, this doesn’t mean that the schools aren’t profitable. It simply means that they can’t grow quickly enough to justify a purely for-profit motive. We saw a similar thing play out at Curro.
Ghost Bite: Generation Group made profit after tax of just R3 million for the six months to February. This selling price is based mainly on the replacement cost of the schools and the existing footprint, rather than the profit it can actually generate. I’ll be very surprised if the independent expert doesn’t opine that the deal is fair and reasonable to shareholders. We will have to wait for the circular in August to know for sure.
Results of previous poll:
Nibbles:
Director dealings:
The obliteration of The Foschini Group (JSE: TFG) share price has finally reached a point where we are seeing massive purchases by directors. That’s a good thing. An associate of Michael Lewis bought shares worth nearly R30 million. The spouse of a non-executive director bought shares worth almost R900k. That’s bullish, but it would still be good to see more executive directors buying shares as a show of faith.
The CEO of Mr Price (JSE: MRP) received share awards and sold 82% of them for R24 million. This is significantly more than he needed to sell just to cover the tax, so that’s a sale in my books. Not a great look when the share price is still way off the pre-NKD levels.
The CEO of Oceana (JSE: OCE) bought shares worth R1.25 million and the CFO joined in with a purchase worth R375k.
The company secretary of Santam (JSE: SNT) sold shares worth R685k.
A director of Sebata Holdings (JSE: SEB) bought shares worth R5k.
As a fun reminder of what real money looks like, the Wiese family entered into a scrip borrowing arrangement over Shoprite (JSE: SHP) shares worth almost R2 billion. This doesn’t tell you anything about the Shoprite share price – I just include it for entertainment value to make us all feel poor.
Sirius Real Estate (JSE: SRE) has placed €185.1 million worth of notes through tap issues in two existing corporate bonds. Essentially, this means that they’ve just increased the size of these bond programmes by issuing more notes (under the same terms and conditions and at current traded prices). They’ve done this to refinance existing debt and for “general corporate purposes” – which would mean either acquisitions or capex projects in the portfolio.
There’s a change to top management at Bell Equipment (JSE: BEL). Ashley Bell is resigning as CEO, as he wishes to return to his own business interests. His resignation is effective from 31 August 2026, although he remains available to assist in a transition period. Ashley will also be appointed as a non-executive director, which makes sense given the family interests here. Izak Jacobus Marthinus van Niekerk has been named as his replacement, having previously worked for Bell from 2003 to 2016.
Pan African Resources (JSE: PAN) is making progress on the acquisition of Emmerson Resources. Emmerson shareholders still need to vote on the deal, with the meeting scheduled for 15th June. But in the meantime, the Australian Stock Exchange (ASX) has confirmed that Pan African will be admitted to the official list subject to certain conditions. In other words, if Emmerson shareholders give it the green light, Pan African will be able to execute the planned additional listing on the ASX. This won’t affect the JSE and LSE listings.
enX Group (JSE: ENX) has received approval from the SARB for the special dividend of R1.92 per share. The payment date is 29 June, based on a last day to trade of 23 June. The current share price is R4.40, so they are paying out over 40% of the value of the company!
Copper 360 (JSE: CPR) shareholders just can’t catch a break. In yet another setback to rebuilding investor confidence, CFO Ferdinand Nel has resigned with immediate effect. This means that no successor has been named as yet, not even on an interim basis.
At long last, the suspension of trade in Wesizwe Platinum’s (JSE: WEZ) shares has been lifted. The share price promptly increased by 80%!
Visual International (JSE: VIS) has received an extension from the JSE for the posting of the RAL Trust circular. The new date is 17 June 2026.
If you are a shareholder or warrantholder in Marshall Monteagle (JSE: MMP), then be aware that the company wants to make some changes to the terms and conditions of the warrants. There’s a shareholder meeting scheduled for 25th June.
Education Investment Impact Fund of South Africa has entered into an agreement with Trematon Capital Investments to acquire the enterprise known as the Generation Education Group for an aggregate cash consideration of R172 million. The components of the Generation Group, in which Trematon has an 87% interest, include the businesses of PropGen, Si Institute and Generation Education. The transaction represents a category 1 disposal and as such shareholder approval is required.
Old Mutual’s private equity arm (OMPE) alongside Carlye, has exited its 2014 investment in TiAuto Investments, operating through Tiger Wheel & Tyre and Tyres & More stores to Japanese conglomerate Marubeni Corporation. The business which generates annual combined group and franchisee sales of c.R4,5 billion is a pan-African operation with more than 160 retail outlets across five African countries – South Africa, Botswana, Zambia, Zimbabwe and Namibia. The deal is said to be worth R2,6 billion.
Afrimat has disposed of the Divestiture Businesses to Saturc for R215 million. A cash amount of R160 million is payable on close with the balance of R55 million deferred and payable over three years subject to the fulfilment of certain financial and operational conditions. The disposal is in terms of the Tribunal approval given to Afrimat on the acquisition in April 2024 of Lafarge South Africa.
Unlisted Companies
South African end-to-end rail services company Traxtion has concluded an US$86 million equity capital raise from Standard Bank, Stanlib Infrastructure Investments and Harith via the Harith InfraCo and PAIDF2 funds. The capital will be used to fund the rolling stock investment programme, and to strengthen its future funding position.
H1, a local investment holding and asset management vehicle, and Revego Fund Managers, a black-owned fund manager, are in discussions to create a renewable energy equity investment platform with a combined asset base of c.R13,3 billion. The proposed transaction brings together H1’s interest in a large, diversified portfolio of predominantly operating renewable energy assets with Revego’s institutional investment platform, the Revego Africa Energy Fund. The portfolio managed by H1 spans 26 projects across wind, solar, battery storage and hydro. The merged platform will positioned to play an active role in the anticipated wave of industry consolidation from 2028 onwards.
The Sasfin Share Incentive Trust has made a firm cash offer of R42.00 per share to acquire the remaining minority shares in Sasfin Holdings by way of a Scheme of Arrangement. Sasfin Holdings delisted from the JSE in December 2024 with a number of minority shareholders remaining invested in the unlisted entity.
The Development Bank of Southern Africa (DBSA) has announced an undisclosed investment into Zimi, an end-to-end solution provider for electric vehicles – charging, power, finance – powered by a seamless digital management platform. The partnership represents growing institutional support for local electric mobility and sustainable transport infrastructure.
Kloset Klub, a circular fashion platform, has received an undisclosed second investment from Thinkroom’s early-stage portfolio. Kloset Klub enables users to buy and sell pre-owned fashion through a curated resale model, peer-to-peer transactions and managed wardrobe services.
Novus has acquired an additional 6,001,060 Mustek shares at R15.00 per share on the open market (outside of the Mandatory Offer) for R90 million. The company now holds 28,96 million Mustek shares constituting 50.39% of the issued shares in Mustek. Together with concert parties this shareholding increases to c.70.68%.
Oasis Crescent Property Fund has issued 827,719 new units to shareholders opting to reinvest their distribution in respect of the six months ended 31 March 2026. The shares were issued at a price of R28.78 for an aggregate R24,49 million.
Following the results of the scrip dividend election, Spear REIT will issue 8,276,950 new ordinary shares in the company in lieu of an interim dividend, resulting in a capitalisation of the distributable retained profits in the company of R107.64 million. The shares were based on a reinvestment price of R13.00 per share.
OUTsurance (OGL) has issued 507,726 new shares in exchange for 1,162,705 ordinary shares in OUTsurance Holdings (OHL) for an aggregate R35,88 million. As a result of the transaction, OGL’s shareholding in OHL has increased to 92.86% with the remaining 7.14% held by directors and management.
Master Drilling has declared a special dividend of 40 cents per ordinary share from income reserves, valued at R60,2 million. The dividend will be paid to shareholders on 17 August 2026.
Omina is to pay a special dividend of 280 cents per share, payable in cash in respect of the year ended 31 Mach 2026.
Following the acquisition of Emmerson Resources by Pan African Resources and the request to trade its shares on the ASX, the company has received an ASX conditional admission letter with trading to commence on a normal settlement basis on 2 July 2026. The company’s shares will continue to trade, as a dual primary issuer, on the LSE and JSE following the proposed ASX listing.
On June 11, 2026, the JSE lifted the suspension of trade in Wesizwe Platinum shares on the bourse. The shares were first suspended in June 2025. This was due to the company’s failure to publish its audited annual financial statements for the year ended 31 December 2024 within the period prescribed by the JSE Listing Requirements.
This week the following companies announced the repurchase of shares:
Netcare repurchased 41,451,340 of its ordinary shares in terms of the general authority granted by shareholders. The total value of the shares repurchased was R696,3 million with the average price paid per ordinary share of R16.80. Since commencement of the repurchase programme in September 2023, Netcare has repurchased 193,2 million shares, representing 13.4% of the total shares in issue as at 30 September 2023, at an average of R13.61 per share.
In its annual report, The Foschini Group reported that it had bought back a total of 10 million shares at a weighted average share price per share of R105.89 for a gross consideration of R1,03 billion.
Ninety One plc announced an increase in the repurchase programme from £30 million to £55 million to be completed by 21 July 2026. The shares to be purchased on the open market will be cancelled to reduce the Company’s ordinary share capital. This week the company repurchased a further 163,561 ordinary shares at an average price 217 pence for an aggregate £350,082.
GreenCoat Renewables has implemented a share buyback programme totalling €100 million over 12 months with a first tranche amounting to €25 million beginning on 5 March 2026 – representing 13% of the issued share capital. This week 1,079,250 shares were repurchased for and aggregate €827,307.
Anheuser-Busch InBev’s US$6 billion share buy-back programme continues. The shares acquired will be kept as treasury shares to fulfil future share delivery commitments under the group’s stock ownership plans. During the period 1 to 5 2026, the group repurchased 537,216 shares for €36,97 million.
During the period 1 – 5 June 2026, Prosus repurchased a further 2,631,597 Prosus shares for an aggregate €107,22 million and Naspers, a further 905,808 Naspers shares for a total consideration of R805,88 million.
Two companies issued a profit warning this week: Brikor and Novus.
One company issued or withdrew a cautionary notice: Trematon Capital Investments.
Kasapreko Plc’s IPO attracted total bids of GHS1,72 billion, more than double the targeted raise of GHS700 million, representing an oversubscription of roughly 146%. The IPO consisted of 583,333,333 ordinary shares at GHS1.20 per share. The shares are expected to begin trading next week.
Nigeria’s Agriarche, has received backing from French development finance institution Proparco. Financial terms were not disclosed. Agriarche – a female led agri-tech company, has developed an integrated agricultural model spanning multiple segments of the value chain, including commodity aggregation, logistics, payments for local and export markets through its flagship platform, Kasuwa.
Edafa Venture announced the acquisition of two AI startups operating in construction and healthcare sectors. Kuadra leverages AI to transform the planning, management and execution of large-scale construction projects through interconnected smart operating systems that enhance efficiency and streamline project operations. IRRI Vision is an Egyptian health-tech company that develops AI-powered solutions to support physicians and healthcare providers with faster and more accurate diagnostic tools, helping improve treatment outcomes and overall quality of healthcare services. Financial terms were not disclosed.
Blnk, an Eqyptian fintech company has raised US$12,5 million in equity funding and $24,6 million in local debt facilities. The Series A equity funding round was led by Algebra Ventures, with participation from SANAD Fund for MSME, Endeavor Catalyst and Emirates International Investment Company (EIIC). Debt funding was secured from a number of leading local banks, with notable participation from Suez Canal Bank, Bank Albaraka and National Bank of Egypt, as well as Non-Bank Financial institutions (NBFIs) including Corplease, Globalcorp and BM Lease, among others.
CreditChek raised US$600k in seed funding led by Janngo Capital to expand its credit data infrastructure and services across the East African market. Additional investors include Vastly Valuable Ventures, Unipeg Capital, and returning investor Assembly Investors. CreditChek, based in Nigeria, is a credit assessment provider. The company provides a credit data infrastructure platform that aggregates and standardizes borrower data for financial institutions.
Kenya’s Family Bank has secured the Capital Markets Authority’s approval to list on the Nairobi Securities Exchange on June 23. This comes after Family Bank raised KES 8 billion (US$61,8 million) in a 2025 private placement, exceeding its KES 6.09 billion ($47,1 million) target.
MNT-Halan, an Egyptian fintech ecosystem, has reached a valuation of US$1,4 billion following the first closing of a new investment round led by Al Ahly Capital, the investment arm of the National Bank of Egypt. A second closing is expected as part of the ongoing round.
IQSTEL Inc., a global Connectivity, AI, and Digital Services company, has announced a Binding Memorandum of Understanding to acquire a 51% controlling interest in Ultranet Telecom Group, a fast-growing telecom and technology company headquartered in Ghana with operations across Africa and international markets. The parties are working toward a Definitive Purchase Agreement within 60 days, with a target close in Q3 2026. Financial terms are not being disclosed at this time.
Wilmar International announced that it has entered into definitive agreements with Tropical General Investments Group to combine their respective Nigerian and Republic of Benin operating businesses, into a single integrated platform through a new 50:50 joint venture. Following the signing of the definitive agreements, Wilmar and TGI Group will contribute a portfolio of complementary operating businesses and brands in Nigeria and Benin to the joint venture, spanning upstream agriculture, oil palm plantations, edible oils, edible nuts, rice, culinary, food manufacturing and nationwide distribution amongst others.
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