Monday, March 23, 2026
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Ghost Stories #97: From mechanical work to judgement in portfolio management – reallocating human effort with AI

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At Forvis Mazars in South Africa, the team is actively working on AI-driven solutions for clients.

Shane Cooper (Head of Digital Advisory) is spearheading this effort, with one of the applications of this technology being in the portfolio management space. Institutional investors with complex structures face multiple challenges in managing their investments. As Shane explains in this podcast, it’s an operating model problem rather than a software problem – but AI can help.

Rishi Juta (Director of Corporate Finance) joined this discussion to deliver insight into real-world applications across due diligence and risk management. It’s all about transforming unstructured data and commentary into useful information for decision-making.

This is an excellent introduction to the technology that Forvis Mazars in South Africa is developing for institutional clients.

Topics covered in this podcast:

  • The shift from mechanical work to judgement work – and why it changes the entire process of portfolio oversight.
  • Why unstructured data (like management commentary and board‑pack narratives) often tells you more than the numbers.
  • How “intelligent ingestion” lets AI chew through PDFs, emails, scans, and commentary like a grown‑up sorting out a toddler’s plate of vegetables.
  • Early‑warning risk signals across a portfolio: covenant pressure, reporting behaviour, management tone, governance drift, sector stress and more.
  • How this tech is being built specifically for regulated environments – IFRS, GRAP, scenario planning, traceability, explainability and all the governance that institutions actually need.
  • Why large‑scale portfolios guarantee that humans will miss something – and how an AI layer can stop the rot early, while still taking advantage of having a human in the loop.

If you would like to learn more about this technology, connect with Shane Cooper or Rishi Juta on LinkedIn. For more information on AI-specific applications, you’ll find Shane’s contact details on the Forvis Mazars website.

Full Transcript:

The Finance Ghost: Welcome to the Ghost Stories podcast. Let me tell you, it is going to be properly interesting today, because we are going to learn all about a real-world AI solution. Drumroll please. Exciting, right? 

We keep reading about AI all over the headlines, the internet, and social media, and all over the place. And today we’re going to get close to a homegrown South African solution. Quite exciting.

Let me tell you what it’s trying to do before I introduce you to our guests. So here’s the key issue. Let me paint this picture for you. 

You have these huge institutions, and they manage large and complex portfolios in a (usually) quite cumbersome manner. Not because they want to, but that’s just because it’s the way these things practically tend to happen.

Large teams of people running in different directions, having all kinds of conversations with investee companies, obviously of varying quality and on different topics and with different levels of engagement. Not necessarily a huge amount of consistency.

And then it’s quite difficult to pull everything together for credit meetings. If this is starting to resonate with you, then you’ve spent some time in large institutional investing or in advisory. Investment reporting certainly puts pressure on the value chain as well.

I’ve seen this in practice. I know that many listeners to this podcast will be familiar with this world. 

And what is interesting is that there is a better way to do it – there’s a way to actually take advantage of some pretty cutting-edge technology. AI, of course. But AI is really just a means to an end, right? What matters is how you use it, what you build and why you’re doing it. 

Now, to help us understand that properly today, I’m happy to bring back a familiar voice to Ghost Mail readers and to Ghost Stories listeners. You may remember Shane Cooper from Forvis Mazars in South Africa. 

He is the head of digital advisory, and he did a podcast with me last year on international use cases for AI. The man is building what he’s talking about here. He’s not just commenting on what other people have done. He has put something together at Forvis Mazars that we’ll learn about today. 

Also joining us today is Rishi Juta. Rishi is the Director of Corporate Finance at Forvis Mazars in South Africa. So he certainly knows his way around due diligences, valuations, and structuring of corporate transactions. 

Shane, Rishi, welcome to the show. Thank you for doing this. I’m pretty excited to learn more about it.

Shane Cooper: Thank you, Ghost. Great to be back.

Rishi Juta: Great, Ghost.

The Finance Ghost: All right, Shane, let’s start with you. You call this an operating model problem. Interesting. Not a software problem. I’ve seen this word come up in some of the discussions we’ve had.

Just for the record, I’ve actually been shown the system and it’s pretty interesting. 

So, Shane, not a software problem, an operating model problem. What do you mean by that? What are you actually trying to say about the state of play out there, and why do you think this product is important?

Shane Cooper: Most institutions do not actually suffer from a total absence of software. I think that’s clear. They suffer from the way the work gets done across the chain, from data coming in, to decisions going out. 

So if you look inside a lot of organisations, especially institutions managing complex portfolios, the real pain is not that there is no reporting tool or no dashboard somewhere.  There is a plethora of those out there. The real pain is that the operating chain is messy. 

Data arrives late in different formats from different sources with different levels of quality. And we see that teams spend huge amounts of time extracting the numbers, chasing missing submissions, reconciling versions, normalising templates.

Inconsistencies abound!

And of course, the time that you spend assembling packs is crazy, if you think about the cost of the skills that you bring into an organisation relative to what you’re getting out. 

And by the time all of that is done, people are moeg. The reporting cycle has consumed a lot of energy. And then of course, the real question is whether everyone has actually had enough time to think properly. That’s why I call it an operating model problem. 

The bottleneck is not the absence of software. The bottleneck is the way the organisations are structured, which we accept. Too much effort goes into the administrative motion – classic corporate friction – and not enough into interpretation, judgement, challenge or intervention. Doing stuff with the data and creating value out of it. 

For me, for us at Forvis Mazars, we really think that matters more today – because the world has become more complex. Portfolios are data-heavy, your governance expectations are much higher, committees want faster answers. 

And the date itself is not arriving in lovely neat rows and columns. It’s arriving through emails, PDFs, Excel files, commentary packs, scanned documents, classic unstructured formats – and if you’re lucky, you have an API link.

So if the operating model is still based on people manually stitching stuff together, the reality is that every month or quarter, you’re going to hit a ceiling.

The Finance Ghost: Yeah, I love that. It describes so much experience that I’ve had in my own life in corporate advisory, and all these inefficiencies. And the other point I want to touch on there, that I think is going to come up later in the show and is so important, is the data that comes through in natural language conversations and commentary packs.

You learn more from that, in my opinion, than you do from digging through some of the numbers. 

Certainly, a lot of the numbers are critical, and Rishi is going to tell us about that shortly. But you certainly learn a lot from what management is saying. That’s why investors refer to transcripts, and they try to learn something from that. In private company land, that transcript is a board pack, or it’s a meeting between investors and management. It’s really valuable stuff. 

So Rishi, let’s then move on to how you essentially spend a lot of your time: combing through this private company data, doing due diligence, doing valuations. This is technical work; it’s difficult work. And if the data is not structured nicely or if it comes to you in very poor shape, I imagine it just makes your job that much harder, right? 

So what are some of the challenges that you end up seeing in practice, as you’re doing your day-to-day stuff in the corporate finance team there at Forvis Mazars?

Rishi Juta: Thanks, Ghost. Well, I think it’s a completely different world and I don’t think people fully appreciate just how different it is until they’ve actually worked in it. 

When you’re dealing with public company data, you at least have some scaffolding around you. There’s a market price, there are standard disclosures, there is analyst coverage. There are public filings and there’s broader news flow. And there’s actually some degree of structure in the information released. It may not be perfect, but it is a framework. 

In private company work, especially in due diligence and valuation environments, much of that scaffolding disappears. What you get instead is a much more fragmented information landscape.

You may get management accounts, but they come in different formats with different definitions. You may get boardbacks, commentary notes, customer concentration, schedules, budget files, cabinet packs, legal papers, strategy decks, email explanations and operational updates. All sitting in different worlds and often speaking different languages, even though they are supposed to be describing the same business. 

That is where unstructured information becomes extremely important. A lot of the real story of a business sits outside the financial statements. It sits in the management commentary in the way issues are described, in how risks are framed, in what gets emphasised, in what keeps recurring, in how operational setbacks are explained, and where the strategic story is consistent over time. 

You can learn a lot from how management talks about working capital, customers, delays, margin pressure, leadership changes, or refinancing conversations. And it’s really interesting what happens over time. One month of commentary is just a piece of narrative. Four or five years of commentary starts to become a data set. Then you can begin to see patterns. 

Is the tone changing? Are there some issues being dressed up in different languages? Are strategic priorities shifting too often? Is management becoming more vague or defensive? Are explanations becoming less specific as pressure builds? Is there a growing gap between the story and the numbers? 

That is why unstructured data should not be treated as background noise. In private company environments, it is often one of the richest sources of early insight, especially when combined with structured financial data.

The challenge, of course, is that most traditional tools are not particularly good at handling that. They are often fine with tables and figures, but not with years of qualitative material that may hold clues about leadership quality, strategic consistency, accountability and emerging risk. 

So the opportunity now is to bring those two worlds together, the structured and unstructured, in a much more useful and governed way.

Shane Cooper: If I could jump in there, Ghost. What we think is particularly useful today is dealing with unstructured data, where portfolio oversight becomes really interesting. It’s not just about the numbers anymore. We often make investments as a broader community in the quality of the leadership. But seldom do you interrogate that pattern of language over time. 

The ability now to keep (as part of your corpus) a history of language, creates some really interesting insight on your investments over time. And this is where unstructured data can become incredibly powerful.

The Finance Ghost: I love the reference to that history of language. That’s exactly right. You can even see it in my world when I’m looking at listed companies and the transcripts. You can see how the management tone moves over time, and it changes. And like you say, Rishi, it becomes more defensive or more vague. 

And obviously, in your day-to-day, you are applying professional judgements. That’s why people are hiring you to say, “Listen, please do a due diligence, come back to us with some kind of recommendation based on how you see this thing”. And so you’ve got to do that anyway. 

But you’ve got to do that whether the data arrives and it’s very messy (and it’s a huge menial task to actually get on top of it) or whether it’s a bit easier to get to that point, and then you can actually spend more time thinking, which I guess is the overarching point of AI at the end of the day. 

But Shane, maybe coming back to you on this, the model is only as good as the data that it gets, right? And that’s the reality. And the way it’s been built, and the way it’s been trained, and all those things about AI that are interesting. 

There’s something that I read in a piece you wrote that talks about “intelligent ingestion”, which feels like something I’d like you to teach my toddlers about their vegetables. But I think that’s a very different context. This is intelligent ingestion of data by these models.

What does that actually practically mean? Because this is where the rubber starts to hit the road, right? On what these models actually do. AI, it’s just two letters. It’s a small little term, and yet it’s this incredible technology that has all these elements to it, and this is one of them.

Shane Cooper: The simple idea is this. “Intelligent ingestion” is the process of taking very messy incoming information and turning it into something usable, something that’s structured, that’s governed, and that’s even decision-ready. And you don’t have to rely on armies of people to get it manually done every time. 

So in a normal institutional environment, your data doesn’t arrive in one perfect stream. As we’ve already said, between Rishi and I in the early part of this discussion, it arrives in various forms. Typically email, and normally in the email, the attachments of PDF, Excel, whatever. These inconsistent formats create a huge challenge for data ingestion. 

If you want a coherent view of your portfolio, the first problem is not the final dashboard. The problem is getting all of that raw data into a state where it can be trusted and used. 

So intelligent ingestion is about using technology like document processing, parsing, classification, automation; some RPA built in if you really want to. And then you apply machine learning rules, engines and AI to recognise what has come in. 

Step number one: you need to recognise what comes in, identify what kind of document it is, and then extract the relevant information. And then you map it into a canonical structure. So there is some upfront work that’s required to ensure that the mapping is correct. 

But relative to time that you’d spend over a longer period, this is an investment well worth going through, and then capturing the narrative parts as well as the numerical part. So normally with ingestion, historically you just capture stuff that could be deemed to be structured, and normally that’s numerical. Now you have this amazing ability with AIs to fully ingest unstructured information. 

You do apply some validation checks. We still like to refer to “human in the loop”, just to make sure that you’re 100% certain that the data is transferring correctly. And then for anything that is uncertain or anomalous, you can request a human review as part of your process. 

Now, the last point is important, because we don’t want to pretend that everything comes through magically clean. But from what I’ve seen over the last three months in particular, the technology has moved on significantly. So the point really is to automate the repetitive grind. And then you want to let people focus on the exceptions where judgement is required, and of course, interpretation. 

The analogy around a toddler eating vegetables is something like this. You’re faced with a plate of peas, carrots, broccoli and chaos. The toddler doesn’t see nutrition; it sees some level of betrayal, if you’re anything like me. 

The Finance Ghost: Poison and toxins!

Shane Cooper: Exactly. The intelligent ingestion is basically the grown-up equivalent of taking the vegetables, chopping them properly and sorting them, mixing them to something more useful, and then removing the obviously terrible bits. And deciding what can be eaten safely, and what still needs adult intervention. 

Now, in the portfolio world, which is really why we are here talking about this, instead of broccoli in the trauma, it’s the management accounts, the commentary, the covenant packs, the risk notes. Those things traditionally were all very manual in terms of how you would handle them. 

Now what the system does is (in terms of what we’ve designed)(especially in the unlisted environment, because your information is not that well organised) it helps sort the mess. It extracts what matters, it flags what looks wrong, and then it creates a consistent information base that can actually support the analysis. 

And where this becomes economically important is that if you don’t solve for ingestion, then all of your expensive people spend their time opening files, moving numbers, fixing mappings, and checking versions. It’s not anywhere near high-value work. 

So once you industrialise this ingestion, you properly unlock the rest of the chain. Better reporting, faster ratio calculations, earlier risk identifications, essentially the stuff that you really want to be focusing on. 

The Finance Ghost: That makes a world of sense.I do enjoy the leaning on the toddler example. So thank you. I think that actually makes it clearer. Sometimes you just need to get this very visual representation to be like, “Okay, that actually does make sense”. So thank you. I like that. 

So far, we’ve talked about how, in private company land, the data is going to come in a way that is messy. We accept this. A lot of it is going to be natural language, a lot of it is going to be discussions, maybe even be emails. Who knows? Anything that is just natural language.

That, for me, in my very layman’s understanding of AI, is where AI is so different to the world we’ve come from. It can actually read and then summarise properly, in theory at least, and come up with some pretty cool insights. 

So I can understand how this machine is just creating more data across a portfolio, and feeding it into this AI model. But of course what really counts is what comes out the other side and what we can do with it. 

So Rishi, I’m going to bring it back to you here because now we’re stepping back into your world.

You’ve already mentioned some of the issues around the data that comes in a private company. I think as Shane has explained to us, maybe it is really just chopping up the carrots and the peas, and just getting it to a point where this toddler’s going to eat it. Now it’s your job to eat it, right? 

Sorry for using you as the toddler in this analogy, but unfortunately, it’s about the closest we can really get here [laughs]. Maybe we’ll make you the parent; we’ll think of an innovative way. 

But the underlying principle is that there needs to be a point to all of this, and that point needs to address a client’s need. Now we’ve got financial investors, we’ve got DFIs, we’ve got institutions. They all have nuanced investment philosophies. One might be purely for profit, others might be impact investing, and they’ll have different kinds of metrics and everything else. 

I feel like it all comes down to measurement and risk. At the end of the day, that feels to me like what it really comes down to. In your eyes, how does this technology make that whole process better, from the perspective of the clients and what they’re looking for?

Rishi Juta: Thanks Ghost. I think that’s exactly the right way to frame it, because once you strip away the jargon, the real issue is risk, and the ability to make good decisions early enough for that decision to still matter. 

Different institutions absolutely do have different philosophies. A purely commercial investor may be focused more narrowly on return, downside protection and exit value. A DFI may also be thinking about development, impact, mandate alignment, policy relevance, governance and long-term sustainability. 

But in all cases, you still need a way of converting a messy information environment into a usable view of risk. What this kind of technology does, is give you a much stronger risk measurement and decision support layer. 

It allows you to bring together structural financial information, covenant positions, operational indicators, management commentary, reporting behaviour, and external signals into one environment.

That matters because real-world risk is rarely one dimensional. It is not just one ratio moving. It is often a combination of deterioration in the numbers, changes in management tone, missed reporting deadlines, governance drift, sector pressure, and weakening narrative consistency. 

So from a risk perspective, the benefit is that you can start seeing patterns much earlier. You can move from static, retrospective reporting into a more dynamic view. You can assess not only where an investor is today, but how it is trending, how close it is to stress, what the pressure points are and whether the warning signals are financial, operational, behavioural, or external. 

And that becomes especially useful in environments where early intervention matters. If you wait until the business is already in serious distress, the room for recovery is much smaller. 

But if you can identify signs of covenant pressure, cash strain, operational slippage or management inconsistency early, you have a much better chance of engaging management, challenging assumptions and pushing a remedial program where there is still an opportunity. 

It also helps because risk is not just about the business. It’s about leadership quality, execution, as well as discipline. If the qualitative material over time is showing strategic inconsistency, repeated excuses, declining clarity or weak accountability, that is relevant. Good risk management should be able to consider that, not just the income statement.

The real value here is that it gives institutions a more complete and more timely picture of risk. It supports better prioritisation, faster escalation, and more confident decision-making.

Shane Cooper: What I would add to that, Ghost, is that the covenant intelligence provides very useful information, because once the data lands, you instantly have your covenant position, your key ratios, and then of course your distance to breach, which is useful information. 

The second is the early warning triggers. Those go well beyond pure covenant maths. They have to include things like reporting delays, management churn, sector stress, and adverse news, especially in today’s challenging economic environment. Those are all the signals that help you stop the rot early, rather than only documenting the distress after the fact. 

And the reason why we feel strongly about this is that very few companies come back from deep formal distress gracefully. For us, the real leverage here is this earlier engagement, the earlier challenge and early remediation.

The Finance Ghost: So the way I like to think about it is, I listen to all of this, and I know that when you have smart people working on your portfolio and on your due diligence, if they have a relatively small number of data points to look at, chances are very good that they will pick this stuff up. I think we accept that. And even then, there’s a risk that they won’t, because human error is part of it. 

Shane, in that podcast we did last year, you pointed out some really cool use cases internationally, where some of the best engineers in the world are using AI because of the human error factor, and because the AI rules-based approach catches a lot of that stuff. So even on a relatively small data set, human error is a risk. 

But when you get to a huge portfolio (and here we’re talking institutional level applications, really) and you’ve got multiple portfolio companies, lots of different board packs all the time, you’re getting inundated with this stuff, you’re looking at new investments all the time where you have to make really good decisions – it’s basically a guarantee you’re going to miss something, right? When you’re managing a portfolio like this, it’s just a reality.

So this is where this AI model steps in and says, “Listen, we can give you the early warning triggers”. And like you say, it still needs a human in the loop and someone who can apply that judgement to it. 

Rishi, when you’re working on that due diligence, you’re applying judgement to what’s coming out of it. But if there’s a tool that gives you a better way to catch everything, or at least to get closer to catching absolutely everything, that can only be a benefit. 

That really does feel very sensible to me. And again, I’ve had the benefit of actually seeing the product.

So I would encourage people who are listening to this, if you think this is interesting, speak to the team. Because actually seeing the stuff is pretty cool. It really does help you visualise. “Oh, this is interesting. This is very colorful”. This dashboard shows you, across all these different names, where it might be going wrong, where it’s not, where it’s already in breach, where it has a high probability of breach, and all those kinds of things. Which I do enjoy.

And Shane, I’m going to come back to you here, because I can see these use cases. If someone is listening to this and going, “Oh, I’m not sure what this is for”, then I would be so bold as to say it’s probably not for you because you haven’t lived these problems. These problems exist. 

So if you’re listening to this and going, “Oh my goodness, that sounds like my life”, then this is for you. The point is that it just takes away a lot more of that menial work. Both of you have already alluded to that. And it gives you more time to actually do something with the outputs, right? 

I just want to throw it back to you, Shane, for some commentary on that. Is that the theme that keeps coming through in how these AI solutions are really adding value in companies? Because I’m certainly seeing that a lot, when I read company narratives about AI projects and what they’re doing.

Shane Cooper: That’s exactly the point, but I’d phrase it slightly more carefully – the value of AI is not just that it saves time, the real value is that it reallocates human effort from low-value mechanical work to high-value judgement work.

And that shift is really important. The additional benefit is that it can do for you, what, as a human being, you were never capable of doing before. 

As human beings, we’re not put together to understand large data sets and to make connections and correlations that may not appear to you at first glance. So applying AI to huge data sets is extremely powerful.

In a lot of institutions today – (you would know this, Rishi knows this, I know this) – very smart people are spending way too much time on report preparation. Pulling numbers together, checking templates. There are lots of memes about how PowerPoint and Excel essentially run the world. Reconciling versions, writing commentary from scratch, chasing updates. Seriously heavy administrative burdens that we take on in our professional capacities on a daily and weekly basis. 

It’s useful in that it has to get done. But that’s not where the biggest value lies. The real value sits in asking what the numbers mean, why are they changing? What risks are forming? Where is the portfolio the most exposed? Which companies need intervention? What should management be focusing on? What scenario should be modeled and what should the next decisions be? 

Very often in today’s corporate world, you don’t get enough time to handle those conversations. Now you do. So AI and automation should absolutely take away a large portion of the grind.

Intelligent ingestion certainly helps, automated calculation certainly helps, and even the report generation (certainly, at first pass, that breaking of the white space) really does help. 

The biggest story is that once you have a governed base of structured information, AI can also help with anomaly detection, pattern recognition, peer comparisons, and correlation studies with data that you’d never have potentially brought into your data set. And, of course, propensity analysis, which is for me extremely useful based on the unstructured data that you’ve now brought in. 

The platform is not just helping produce a report faster, it’s helping you interrogate the report better. It can surface unusual movements, non-obvious patterns, combinations of signals that may indicate emerging stress, and then areas where human attention should absolutely go first. 

Now, where it gets super exciting for me, is exactly in this point – because the end state is not just a faster reporting machine. The end state is a better decision environment. And I think that’s particularly important in the institutional world because the cost of late insight can be very high. 

If a team spends most of the cycle preparing the pack, and only a small slice of the cycle time thinking about it, then the organisation is structurally late. Now if you flip that, the report comes together much faster. The signals are therefore surfaced much earlier and the anomalies are highlighted automatically. 

And then your conversation changes completely. You get more time to challenge management, more time for scenario thinking, and more time for proper engagement. That’s where it allows for intervention before things go properly sideways. 

So yes, less time reporting, more time doing something more useful with the outputs. And that’s exactly the ambition. 

I would add one more thing. It’s not just more thinking, it’s better-timed thinking. In a portfolio environment where you are managing risk, timing is often everything.

The Finance Ghost: Yeah, I really like that. Judgement work versus mechanical work. I think that’s exactly the point. It’s not just the time saving, it’s what you can do with that time and where you can spend your time. So, very cool. 

Rishi, I’m going to bring it back to you. Maybe last question in your direction. Something else that I understand about this product. Again, this has been built by Forvis Mazars, which I will remind everyone is a proper professional services firm. 

A lot of the work you do is technical. So when you guys are putting together an AI-type product, it is with that application in mind. Stuff like scenario planning, but also IFRS, generally recognised accounting practice standards, all that kind of work. 

There are applications here of this technology, right? Would it be fair to say that it’s been built for regulated environments?

Rishi Juta: Thanks, Ghost. Yes, that’s the essence of it. The point is not to build something flashy for loosely governed environments. The point is to build something that actually stands up inside serious institutional settings where control, traceability, governance and explainability matter. 

Once you’re operating in those kinds of environments, whether it’s a financial institution, a DFI, or another regulated entity, you quickly realise that speed on its own is not enough. 

You need speed with discipline. You need to know where the data came from. How it was transformed, what was validated automatically, what needed intervention, what assumptions were applied, what changed over time, and how you would evidence that to internal audit, external audit, or regulators if required. 

That is where the more technical applications become important. Scenario planning is a good example. If you have a governed data layer and the ability to integrate external data, you can do much more meaningful stress-testing and sensitivity analysis. You’re not just looking at static history, you are looking at how the portfolio behaves under different scenarios, sector shocks, liquidity conditions or broader market stress. 

Then you bring in things like IFRS 9 and GRAP 104. The point is not that the platform replaces professional judgement or accounting standards, but it gives you a much stronger information base for those processes. 

If you already have governed data, historical patterns, covenant status, commentary and external signals in one environment, then your credit assessment, impairment thinking, expected credit loss and related reporting become much more robust and much faster. This has clearly been conceived for environments where governance is not optional; it’s part of the operating DNA.

The Finance Ghost: Shane, maybe if we then bring it home with you. Who do you want to be speaking to this product about, at this stage in its development journey? 

I understand you guys have made a lot of progress already. I’ve seen it myself. I would imagine it’s at the period now where you are open to conversations with particular clients who are maybe looking for solutions like these. 

So perhaps just to bring us home, if someone could phone you two minutes after they listen to this podcast or perhaps send you an email, who would you want that person to be? What are the conversations you want to be having?

Shane Cooper: I think it would be any executive who is sitting in an asset management or a DFI environment, who’s experiencing corporate pain at the moment. It’s the visibility of your portfolio. Are you uncomfortable with the degree to which you manage risk in your portfolio? We’ve got a solution for you.

The Finance Ghost: Very nice. I like that. 

Gentlemen, I’m going to leave it there. I think this is pretty exciting, and again, I’ll remind listeners that this is a software solution being built by Forvis Bazaars. So congratulations to the team on that side. I think this is quite innovative and probably somewhat unique within these professional services environments. 

I really like what I saw in the demo that you showed me. Obviously, it’s still in development, but there’s a lot of cool thinking there, some great visualisations, and I can see the use case. 

So I will include in the show notes ways for people to contact both of you. 

From my side, good luck with the ongoing development of this thing. AI is such a fast-moving space that I suspect we’ll be checking in on this technology in a few months to come, perhaps. Hopefully, by then it’s already being used in some really exciting applications. 

So Shane, Rishi, thank you very much for your time today and good luck with the ongoing development of this thing.

Shane Cooper: Thank you Ghost, great to be with you again.

Rishi Juta: Thanks Ghost.

Ghost Bites (Hulamin | Labat Africa | Premier | The Foschini Group | York Timber)

Hulamin made losses in 2025 (JSE: HLM)

The situation is much worse than initially thought

When a trading statement talks about a move of “at least 20%”, then you need to be very careful. This is the minimum requirement under JSE Listings Requirements, so the move could actually be much worse than 20%.

The idea is that companies must release a trading statement when they have a high degree of certainty that the move will exceed 20%. They must also update the market when they have a better idea of the range.

Hulamin gives us a perfect example of this in practice. In December 2025, they released a trading statement flagging a drop of at least 20% in HEPS for the year ended December 2025. The narrative made it clear that it was a particularly ugly year, with operational challenges at the mill in the aftermath of an integrated plant shutdown.

But now we know exactly how bad things got, as a further trading statement notes that they’ve actually swung into a deeply loss-making position. The normalised headline loss per share was -25 cents to -31 cents, a huge swing from profits of 55 cents per share in the prior period.

The prior period numbers have been restated based on the classification of Extrusions as a discontinued operation.

The share price fell more than 10% on the day. It’s now down 27% over six months.


Labat Africa to acquire the rest of Ahnamu Investments (JSE: LAB)

Someone is getting a great deal here – but who?

Labat Africa has agreed to acquire the remaining 49% in Ahnamu Investments from Humza Khan, an unrelated party. This comes after they acquired 51% of Ahnamu in a deal announced in March 2025.

Labat also announced that the seller of the original 51% in Ahnamu, Christopher Mark Govender, has disposed of his full holding of 200 million shares in Labat (roughly 12% of the total shares in issue).

Labat will be paying for the remaining 49% through the issuance of new Labat shares worth R40 million. We will have to see how long Khan decides to keep them!

Ahnamu is an ICT solutions provider operating across the SADC region. In the nine months ended November 2025, the company had net assets of R185.1 million and profit after tax of R41.9 million.

You may recall the recent announcement regarding Ahnamu’s relationship with Shafi Incorporated. This is a five-year supply and services agreement with an estimated run-rate of R200 million per annum in revenue. This should give a significant further boost to the financial performance.

But here’s the thing: the price just makes absolutely no sense.

Ahnamu has annualised profit of roughly R56 million – and that’s before we even take the new supply agreement into account. Labat paying R40 million for 49% implies a value of R81.6 million for 100% of Ahnamu. Or, put differently, a Price/Earnings multiple of less than 1.5x.

Someone here is getting the deal of a lifetime. Let’s hope it’s the Labat shareholders.


Excellent earnings growth at Premier (JSE: PMR)

Mid-single digit revenue growth seems to be all they need

Premier Group continues to do a fantastic job of driving earnings growth, despite only relatively modest revenue growth.

In a trading statement for the year ending March 2026, the company noted that HEPS has grown by between 20% and 30%. This is an exceptional outcome, particularly as it was achieved with revenue growth of only mid-single digits.

Deflation in global grain prices has put downward pressure on revenue growth, with Premier expecting that situation to continue. Although this drives higher volumes (as the products are more affordable for consumers), it requires the company to run as efficiently as possible.

The Aeroton mega-bakery has been commissioned and is expected to drive further efficiencies and scale benefits in the inland region.

The acquisition of RFG Holdings is expected to be completed by 30 March 2026. This trading statement excludes anything to do with the accounting for that transaction.

I really hope that the acquisition won’t prove to be a mistake. The two companies have such different earnings profiles. When they are combined, investors won’t be able to choose one or the other anymore.

It’s also worth noting that Premier repurchased 1.4% of its issued shares for R323 million during March 2026.

With the deal about to close, what are your thoughts on the Premier – RFG combination?

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Premier + RFG: ready for a new era?

What are your thoughts on this deal?


The Foschini Group flags a HEPS decline of at least 20% (JSE: TFG)

Just how bad will it be?

The Foschini Group has released a trading update for the 50 weeks ended 14 March 2026. This is just a couple of weeks short of the full financial year, so the group also feels confident enough to release a trading statement dealing with the 12 months to March 2026.

The fourth quarter of the year has been better than the earlier periods in TFG Africa, as the two-pot withdrawal impact was much lighter in Q4’25 than in Q3’25. Base effects make a big difference in retail.

Q4’26 sales growth currently sits at 7.6%, which is significantly better than the year-to-date growth rate of 5.2%.

Encouragingly, gross margin has now normalised. It’s not enough to make up for the pain earlier in the year, so management is asking investors to focus on exit velocity (the performance at the end of the period – a measure of momentum) rather than the full-year numbers. In practice, investors will look at both concepts.

Looking abroad, TFG London has only managed growth of 0.4% year-to-date excluding White Stuff. If we isolate Q4, which includes White Stuff in the base, growth was 3.4%. This confirms that White Stuff is achieving decent growth, with pro-forma sales growth of 5.2% year-to-date in that business.

TFG Australia has little in the way of good news. Q4 sales have been flat, while the year-to-date situation is a decrease in sales of 1.4% (in local currency).

Of course, such tepid revenue performance is nowhere near enough to protect profitability. In a previous trading statement, the group noted an expected decline in earnings per share of at least 20%. They’ve now confirmed that HEPS will also decline by at least 20%.

Be very careful of wording like “at least 20%” – as you will see in the York Timber example below, the words “at least” can work very hard.


A less-than-ideal day for York Timber (JSE: YRK)

A trading statement paints an ugly picture – and the CEO is leaving

Earlier in March, York Timber released a trading statement that indicated HEPS growth of between 1.82% and 6.78% for the six months to December 2025. In an updated trading statement, they suddenly expect HEPS to drop by between 50.18% and 52.49%.

What on earth is going on here?

The first important point is that the guided HEPS range for the latest period is unchanged in the updated trading statement (still 14.57 cents to 15.28 cents). The change is to the base period, where HEPS was restated from 14.31 cents to 30.67 cents – this explains why the percentage move has changed so much. They will give full details on this in the earnings release on 31 March.

As if this wasn’t weird enough, shareholders were also asked to stomach the news of York CEO, Gabriël Stoltz, resigning from the role with effect from 31 March 2026. That’s an almost immediate departure, which is never a good sign.

Stoltz has been there since 2017, first as the CFO and then as the CEO in 2022. He’s agreed to make himself available to the group during a transition period on an as-needed basis.

A replacement CEO hasn’t been announced at this stage.

The share price fell 8.2% on the day. Here’s the kicker though: the news about the CEO only came out when markets were closed. The market move was only in response to the trading statement, not the sudden change in leadership.

Hold on to your hats with this one!


Nibbles:

  • Director dealings:
    • A director of Sibanye-Stillwater (JSE: SSW) bought shares worth R7.3 million.
    • An independent non-executive director of KAL Group (JSE: KAL) bought shares worth R62k.
  • There is limited liquidity in the stock of South Ocean Holdings (JSE: SOH), so I’ll just mention the results for the year ended December 2025 down here. Revenue fell by only 3%, yet operating profit tanked by 86%. This is what happens in a business with paper-thin margins. HEPS fell by 70% to just 6.81 cents. Ouch.
  • Salungano Group (JSE: SLG) is catching up on its financial reporting. This is why the company has released a trading statement dealing with the year ended March 2025 – and no, that isn’t a typo! HEPS has swung strongly positive, coming in at between 0.5 cents and 4.0 cents vs. the headline loss of 111.91 cents in the year ended March 2024. It looks like the 2025 financials will be released within the next week.

The man who would rule 7,000 robotic vacuums

A harmless side project resulted in an unexpected glimpse inside thousands of homes, exposing just how thin the line between ownership and access has become. What started as a geek’s experiment ended as a reminder that the devices we control may not be entirely ours to command.

When Spanish software engineer Sammy Azdoufal started messing around with the code of his new robot vacuum cleaner at the start of this year, he did it with the most innocent (and geeky) of intentions. All he wanted was to be able to steer his robot vacuum with a gaming controller, as if it were a dust-sucking remote control car. Fun, right?

It’s the sort of side project that tends to live and die on a GitHub repository, noticed only by a handful of people who appreciate the technical novelty and dedication to a trivial idea. Instead, it ended with Azdoufal accidentally gaining access to thousands of other people’s homes.

And I don’t mean that metaphorically. Because although Azdoufal only wanted to hack his own vacuum cleaner, what he really achieved was unlimited access to 7,000 of them. 

The king of the robovacs

While building the custom controller for his DJI Romo robot vacuum, Azdoufal reportedly used an AI coding assistant to help reverse-engineer how the device communicated with its cloud servers. This line of communication, in itself, is not unusual. Many modern consumer devices are less self-contained machines than they are endpoints in a larger network, constantly talking to remote systems in order to function. Welcome to what’s called the Internet of Things (or IoT for short).

To control his own vacuum, Azdoufal needed to replicate that conversation. He needed credentials – digital proof that he was the rightful owner of the device – so that his app could issue commands and receive data. What he found, however, was not a neatly fenced-off system tied to a single machine. Instead, it was a wide open door.

The same credentials that allowed him to see and control his own robot gave him simultaneous access to nearly 7,000 models of the same robot vacuum across 24 countries. Through what appears to have been a backend security flaw, Azdoufal could access live camera feeds, microphone audio, spatial maps, and status data from devices he did not own and had never interacted with, inside the homes of people he had never met before.

For a brief moment, he had what can only be described as a distributed, global surveillance system, assembled not through malice, but by pure accident.

Azdoufal does the right thing

To his credit, Azdoufal did not treat the discovery as an opportunity.

There is a version of this story that plays out very differently – one where curiosity turns into exploitation. Even if Azdoufal himself didn’t make use of his live feed into strangers’ homes for malicious or criminal purposes, he could have sold that access to others who would. The tools were there. The access was real. And, for a brief moment, it appears to have been largely undetected and unrestricted.

Fortunately, he chose not to go down that path. Instead of probing further, Azdoufal documented what he had found and shared it with journalists, who in turn contacted DJI to report the issue. Following the responsible disclosure, DJI awarded him a $30,000 bug bounty for identifying the vulnerability (a standard industry practice designed to encourage exactly this kind of restraint). 

DJI also made a statement about the incident, saying that it plans to “continue to implement additional security enhancements”, but did not specify what those may entail.

7,000 eyes

The device in question, the DJI Romo, is not especially unusual by robovac standards. It is an autonomous vacuum and mop like so many of its peers, equipped with cameras and sensors that allow it to navigate a home, distinguish between rooms, and avoid obstacles. It can be scheduled and monitored through an app, but most of its work happens independently.

In order to do that work, however, it needs to “see”. It needs to collect visual data about its environment, build maps, identify surfaces, acclimatise to its owner’s routines and update its understanding as the home changes. Some of that data is processed locally, but a significant portion is sent to and stored on remote servers.

In other words, the vacuum you bought to clean your floors is also, by necessity, a device that continuously documents the layout, contents and rhythm of your home and communicates that information to a server, probably hosted on a cloud somewhere. 

This is not a hidden feature. It is simply part of what we accept as the cost of convenience.

The illusion of ownership

If you went out and bought a robot vacuum today, you would assume that you own it.

After all, you paid for it. It sits in your home, charging itself using your electricity. It responds to your commands. It cleans your floors on a schedule you set. Ownership, in the traditional sense, seems straightforward. And yet, in practice, that ownership comes with conditions, as we’ve now learned. This is not unique to robot vacuums. In fact, if we look closely, we may spot a pattern that has reshaped consumer technology over the past decade.

Printers, for instance, increasingly rely on subscription models that can limit functionality if payments lapse. Features that once belonged to the physical device are now tied to ongoing subscription services. Stop paying, and the machine you “own” may be remotely deactivated. Despite owning the hardware, the paper and the ink required, you may find yourself unable to print a single page.

Smartphone updates are often framed as improvements. And, in many cases, they are. They patch security flaws, introduce new features, and extend the lifespan of devices that might otherwise become obsolete. In theory, an update is something you receive. In practice, it is something that happens to your device – sometimes with your consent, sometimes with only the appearance of it.

Over the past few years, several high-profile updates have reminded users of that distinction.

In the first quarter of 2025, Samsung was forced to pause the global rollout of a major Android update after a bug prevented some users from unlocking their own phones. For those affected, the object in their hands – a device they had paid for and relied on – became temporarily inaccessible because of a software change they didn’t ask for, which was delivered completely remotely.

Even when updates don’t break functionality outright, they can still disrupt the familiarity that makes a device feel like yours. Apple’s more recent iOS releases, for instance, have drawn widespread complaints about changes to core features as basic as typing. Users reported erratic autocorrect, lagging keyboards, and interfaces that behaved differently from one day to the next. These may be small shifts, but they tend to accumulate into a sense that the device you own is being controlled by someone else.

In each of these cases, the same pattern reveals itself. Whether a printer, a phone or a robot vacuum, the physical object is only part of the system. The rest exists elsewhere, in infrastructure that the user does not control.

Ownership, then, becomes something closer to a negotiated experience than a fixed state.

Who’s controlling who?

There is a certain irony in the fact that Azdoufal began with the intention of gaining more direct control over his own device. He wanted to bypass the standard interface and to interact with the machine on his own terms. In trying to take control, he briefly revealed how diffuse that control had become.

It is tempting to treat episodes like this as technical anomalies – bugs to be fixed, patches to be deployed, lessons to be filed away for future engineers. But they also function as glimpses into the underlying architecture of modern life and reminders of what we own, and what we don’t

You can still buy the device. You can still place it in your home. You can still press the button that sets it in motion. But somewhere between that button and the movement of the machine, there is a chain of dependencies that now extends far beyond your walls.

Most of the time, that chain works exactly as intended. Occasionally, as Azdoufal discovered, it does not.

As scary as it may be to contemplate, the outcome of that situation depends on the human who cracks the code, on purpose or otherwise. In this case, it was a good one.

About the author: Dominique Olivier

Dominique Olivier is the founder of human.writer, where she uses her love of storytelling and ideation to help brands solve problems.

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. She now also writes a regular column for Daily Maverick.

Dominique can be reached on LinkedIn here.

UNLOCK THE STOCK: Araxi

Unlock the Stock is a platform designed to let retail investors experience life as a sell-side analyst. Corporate management teams give a presentation and then we open the floor to an interactive Q&A session, facilitated by the hosts.

We are grateful to the South African team from Lumi Global, who look after the webinar technology for us.

In the 66th edition of Unlock the Stock, Araxi returned to the platform to talk about the recent numbers and the strategic outlook for the business.

I couldn’t make this one, so you are in the capable hands of Mark Tobin of Coffee Microcaps and the team from Keyter Rech Investor Solutions.

Watch the recording here:

Ghost Bites (Aspen | Exxaro | Investec | Momentum | Schroder European Real Estate)

Aspen has released the circular for the APAC disposal (JSE: APN)

This is the deal that will massively improve the balance sheet

If you feel like some light reading this weekend, Aspen’s 134-page circular is now available here. They are selling off their operations in Australia and New Zealand, regions that contributed 26% of group EBITDA for the year ended June 2025.

In other words: this is important.

With Aspen having been through tough times recently, the market has welcomed this deal. Not only does it lead to a much stronger balance sheet, but it also allows management to focus on the key initiatives that need to be delivered. This includes driving the GLP-1 business in South Africa, and winning additional manufacturing contracts in France and South Africa to replace the holes that have been left by the loss of contracts.

Aspen is one of the very few South African companies that achieved success in Australasia. They started in the region in 2001. 25 years later, Aspen Australasia is one of the top five OTC companies in Australia by both value and volume. I’m sure they’re sad to see it go, but they can at least celebrate a solid value-creation journey.

The price of R26.5 billion represents an EV/EBITDA multiple of 11x (on a normalised basis). That’s a decent price.

Perhaps the most impressive thing about this transaction is that they got it done for a cost of R25 million. There’s no massive fee payable to a corporate finance advisor, with RMB only acting as the transaction sponsor. This is less than 0.1% of the deal value. Keep this in mind next time you see a transaction with ridiculous fees!

If everything goes ahead in this transaction, which I’m sure it will, then Aspen will be on much firmer footing going forwards.

But what do you think? Is there more value to be extracted from this story?


Exxaro’s dividend policy makes a difference (JSE: EXX)

There’s a juicy payday for investors

Exxaro has released earnings for the year ended December 2025. The HEPS story was decent in the end, with the dividend as the real highlight.

We begin with the coal business, which generates almost all of the group’s EBITDA.

Exxaro’s total coal production increased by 1% for the year, as did sales. Volumes to Eskom were down 2%, exports were up 2% and other domestic thermal sales increased 28%. Revenue increased by 3% and EBITDA was slightly up.

The renewable energy business had flat revenue due to lower generation. EBITDA came in 17% lower, with cost pressures related to strategic initiatives. Ouch!

Although there was a 16% improvement in corporate costs, it wasn’t enough to avoid group EBITDA dipping by 2% year-on-year. Not only was there the pressure in the energy business, but there were also additional costs related to the manganese acquisition.

Despite what sounds like a rough start to the income statement, HEPS increased by 8%. Equity-accounted investments in iron ore and base metals played an important role here. These come in below the EBITDA line.

Thanks to a revised dividend policy, the final dividend is up 15%! They will now have dividend cover of 1.5x – 2.5x, instead of 2.5x – 3.5x.

Guidance for full year 2026 is coal production and sales of 39.4Mt to 42.8Mt. The midpoint of guidance suggests some improvement from production of 39.9Mt and sales of 39.6Mt in 2025.

There is also a significant expected increase in capital expenditure in coal in 2026 and 2027, so that is going to put pressure on free cash flow after a few years of running below the typical capex levels required to sustain operations.


Only single-digit growth at Investec (JSE: INL | JSE: INP)

They have a lot to do to bring ROE closer to the top of the target range

Investec has delivered a pre-close update for the year ended March 2026. Remember, they report in GBP rather than ZAR, so these are all hard currency returns.

Despite a significant share buyback programme, HEPS will move by between 0% and 2% for the year – so growth is hard to come by. Adjusted earnings per share will be up by between 3% and 6%.

Pre-provision adjusted operating profit will increase by between 3% and 5%. The company has indicated that the credit loss ratio will be within the through-the-cycle range of 25 basis points to 45 basis points. The specifics on that for the full year will be interesting.

If we dig a bit deeper, Southern Africa is expected to be at least 4% up in terms of adjusted operating profit. Return on equity in that business should be around 18%, right in the middle of the medium-term range of 16% to 20%.

As for the UK, adjusted operating profit is expected to be at least flat vs. the prior year. There’s pressure in the banking operations there, specifically in terms of the credit loss ratio. Return on tangible equity (not quite the same as return on equity) should be between 13.3% and 13.7%, right near the bottom of the target range of 13% to 17%.

The UK market is anything but easy at the moment. With Investec so heavily involved in that market, it’s going to be challenging to bring returns up to where they should be.


A tasty jump in the dividend at Momentum (JSE: MTM)

But as we’ve seen across the sector, investment returns have been a drag

Momentum has released results for the six months to December 2025. We will get into the details, but the highlights reel is that normalised HEPS increased by 12% and the dividend per share jumped by 29%. Things are going well.

At the aggregate segmental level, normalised operating profit was up by 9% and normalised investment return increased by 20%. This took normalised headline earnings up by 11%. There are then some group-level adjustments to bring it down to 8%.

How did we get from 8% growth in normalised headline earnings to 12% growth in HEPS? The answer is share buybacks. If there are fewer people eating at the dinner table, there’s more food for each person. Importantly, the repurchases were achieved at a price that reflects an average discount of 17.5% to the embedded value per share.

The recent trend among the life insurers has been one of growth in premiums and pressure on value of new business (VNB). This is due to a change in consumer preferences around product mix. Sure enough, at Momentum, single premiums grew by 12% and VNB fell by 15%. New business margin fell from 0.7% to 0.5%.

For the most part, operating profit increased in the underlying segments.

There are some exceptions, with Momentum Retail as the ugly duckling thanks to various market factors like the yield curve and the spot rate. This is a highly technical space. It’s also worth noting that India’s operating loss was worse than the prior period due to non-recurring gains.

The star of the show was Momentum Investments, where operating profit increased by 38% thanks to various initiatives around product repricing and increases in assets under management. Momentum Africa also deserves a mention, swinging spectacularly from losses to profits. They’ve done a lot of restructuring in that part of the business.

As a final comment, return on equity decreased from 24.6% to 24.0%. The embedded value per share as at December 2025 was R44.55, with the group achieving return on embedded value per share of 14.3%. The market is demanding a lot more, hence the share price trading at R35.70 – a discount to embedded value per share of just under 20%.

Time for more share buybacks?


Schroder European Real Estate declares its first interim dividend (JSE: SCD)

Watch out for the NAV – and especially the tax

Schroder European Real Estate Investment Trust has announced its net asset value (NAV) as at 31 December 2025. They’ve also declared their maiden interim dividend of 1.48 euro cents per share.

The NAV return over this period is just 0.8%, with property valuations going sideways.

The portfolio vacancy has increased due to a major departure at a property in the Netherlands, so that’s a worry for earnings. There have been some positive movements in leases elsewhere in the portfolio.

Here’s the risk that I still can’t get my head around: the French Tax Authority has issued an assessment for €14.2 million. The group has appealed the assessment, but they haven’t raised any kind of provision for this amount in the financials. Zero. Nada.

The board might have a strong view that nothing is payable here, but this still seems like an aggressive approach.

There are so many property companies I would buy before this one. But if I was going to invest here, I would at least apply a reasonable haircut to the NAV based on that tax assessment. On a market cap of R1.85 billion, a tax issue of around R275 million is material.


Nibbles:

  • Director dealings:
    • Des de Beer has now opened his wallet properly, buying R22.8 million worth of shares in Lighthouse Properties (JSE: LTE).
    • The chairman of Sibanye-Stillwater (JSE: SSW) bought shares worth R668k.
    • An executive director of Libstar (JSE: LBR) bought shares worth R109k.
  • Novus Holdings (JSE: NVS) announced a disposal of properties for R91.7 million. They are in KZN and currently owned by Novus Print, with Mthembu Paper Mill as the lessee. Novus is a shareholder in Mthembu Paper Mill after previously doing a deal with that company, hence the relationship around this property. There’s really no reason for Novus to own the property itself though, so I’m sure shareholders will be happy to see it go. The profit before tax attributable to the letting enterprise was R7.3 million for the year ended March 2025. There are clearly much better uses for the cash.
  • Visual International (JSE: VIS) is looking to raise up to R2 million in cash via a bookbuild. The timing and closing of the bookbuild are at the discretion of the advisors, which is how you know that they aren’t expecting investors to fall over each other in a rush to participate. The bookbuild is in a closed period, so directors may not participate. It’s going to be interesting to see what happens here. Worryingly, the bookbuild is for “working capital requirements while projects come to fruition” – not exactly bullish.

PODCAST: No Ordinary Wednesday Ep123 | Middle East conflict – counting the cost of disruption

Listen to the podcast here:

This image has an empty alt attribute; its file name is Investec-banner.jpg

Markets are sending a surprisingly calm signal in the face of escalating conflict with Iran. Oil prices are rising, supply chains are under pressure, and recession risks are quietly ticking higher, yet equities remain relatively steady.

In the latest episode of No Ordinary Wednesday, Jeremy Maggs is joined by Investec experts in SA and the UK – Callum Macpherson, Phil Shaw and Chris Holdsworth – to unpack what’s really at play.

The conversation explores what happens if the conflict drags on for longer, what key indicators markets are watching and what risks to the global economy are already emerging.

Hosted by seasoned broadcaster, Jeremy Maggs, the No Ordinary Wednesday podcast unpacks the latest economic, business and political news in South Africa, with an all-star cast of investment and wealth managers, economists and financial planners from Investec. Listen in every second Wednesday for an in-depth look at what’s moving markets, shaping the economy, and changing the game for your wallet and your business.

Also on Apple Podcasts, Spotify and YouTube:

Ghost Bites (Astral Foods | BHP | Ethos Capital | iOCO | Master Drilling | PPC | Sabvest | Vukile Property Fund)

Astral Foods is printing money (JSE: ARL)

Interim HEPS will be through the roof

Astral Foods released a trading update ahead of an important investor conference coming up next week. This is common practice among companies, as it frees them up to discuss the performance in more detail with institutional investors and analysts at the conference.

The trading statement deals with the six months ending March 2026. And what a period it is – HEPS is expected to increase by at least 435%! Or, put differently, HEPS will be at least 5.3x larger (at least R21.88) than in the comparable period (when it was R4.09).

When things go well in poultry, they go extremely well. And in this case, just about everything has been going well.

Volumes and selling prices are up, margins have improved thanks to favourable feed input costs, other costs are under control, and there have been no major business disruptions.

The market knows that HEPS is volatile, hence the share price is up by “only” 61% over 12 months. That’s a great performance, but it obviously trails the percentage move in HEPS.


A new CEO at BHP (JSE: BHG)

Mike Henry moves on after 6.5 years in the role

BHP has announced that Mike Henry will be stepping down from the top job at the company. Having been CEO for 6.5 years, he steered them through the COVID period and its aftermath.

His successor is Brandon Craig, who has more than 25 years of experience at BHP. He is currently President: Americas at BHP, which encompasses the operations in North and South America. This gave him plenty of exposure to copper as the key future metal.

He also previously led the Western Australia Iron Ore business, so there’s plenty of experience here across the key operations in the group.

BHP is the world’s largest mining company, so a new CEO is a big deal. And yes, he’s a South African!

What do you think we will see from BHP over the next few years?


Ethos Capital is in the final stages of its value unlock (JSE: EPE)

There’s just one asset left

Ethos Capital has released results for the six months to December 2025. Due to the specifics of this company, they are far more out of date than you might think!

You see, Ethos Capital is busy monetising its assets and returning the proceeds to shareholders. Much has happened since December 2025, so they also give the net asset value (NAV) per share as at 17 March 2026.

It’s a moving target, as the only remaining asset in the group is a 4.5% indirect stake in Optasia (JSE: OPA) that was retained after the IPO of that company. This means that you could technically work out the NAV per share on a daily basis for Ethos Capital.

As at 17 March 2026, the NAV per share was R7.65. The Ethos share price is trading at roughly a 10% discount to the NAV, reflecting the uncertainty and costs involved in monetising the remaining stake. The post-IPO lock-up is in place until May 2026, so Ethos is stuck until then with the Optasia shares.

It’s almost time for this investment holding company to head off into the sunset.


The turnaround at iOCO continues (JSE: IOC)

I love the way they give earnings guidance

iOCO has a great story to tell at the moment. In the results for the six months ended January 2026, HEPS increased by a substantial 47.4%.

This was achieved despite revenue growth of only 3.5%, so you can see that the group is tightly managing the expense base. EBITDA was up by 21% and operating profit increased by 12%. Thanks to net finance costs dropping by 35%, this was enough to achieve the excellent result in HEPS.

Even more encouragingly, the group has raised its guidance for full-year EBITDA to above R610 million (previously R580 million – R600 million). They expect that recurring revenue will be at least 60% of the business, with a minimum of 60 cents in free cash flow per share.

How often do you see free cash flow per share guidance in South Africa? In fact, how often do you see such detailed guidance at all?

As a sign of just how far things have come for this group, their latest acquisition (MySky Group) will be settled with R47 million in cash and R5 million in shares. Keep in mind that iOCO is the phoenix that emerged from the ashes of EOH. To see acquisitions being settled (even partially) in shares is incredible.


Master Drilling flags a modest decline in HEPS (JSE: MDI)

The release of a trading statement was triggered for other reasons

Master Drilling has released a trading statement for the year ended December 2025. HEPS in rand will be between 6.9% lower and 3.0% higher than the prior period, so the mid-point of that range is a slightly negative year-on-year move.

In US dollars, HEPS will be between 4.5% lower and 5.6% higher than the prior period. In this case, the mid-point is slightly in the green.

The reason why a trading statement was required is that earnings per share (EPS) has jumped by between 63.1% and 73.0% in rand (or between 66.9% and 77.4% in US dollars). This is thanks to the reversal of previous impairments to the Mobile Tunnel Boring Machine. It’s a reminder of the uncertainty that the company needs to deal with in its operations, as things can change quickly around the usefulness of specific equipment.


PPC continues to “Awaken the Giant” (JSE: PPC)

Revenue and profits are heading in the right direction

PPC released an operational update for the ten months to January 2026. The market clearly liked it, as the share price closed 8.4% higher on the day. The “Awaken the Giant” strategy is working beautifully.

Revenue for the period is up 4% and adjusted EBITDA increased by 22%. In this case, the adjustments make EBITDA lower rather than higher, as they are reversing out a sale of a non-core property for an accounting profit. I would therefore suggest working with the adjusted numbers.

On an adjusted basis, EBITDA margin was 280 basis points higher at 19.4%. Both the SA Group and Zimbabwe contributed positively here, as you’ll find out in more detail below.

Capital expenditure for the full year will be slightly below the guidance of R450 million. This is due to maintenance activity and related shutdowns spilling over into the new financial year. Those shutdowns have caused a temporary spike in inventory of R208 million.

The shutdowns mean that net cash flow before investing activities is R567 million in the current period, down from R692 million in the comparable period.

The South African group is in a net cash position of R367 million, a juicy improvement from R106 million as at 31 January 2025. This is a good time to remind you that PPC was once an absolute basket case, with all the talk being around whether the group would end up in business rescue!

Here’s another important nugget for those keeping an eye on Botswana: cement volumes in that country are down. The diamond casualties continue.

South African volumes are up by 2%. Just a modest uptick in local activity would make a world of difference to PPC’s business.

Despite this light growth in South Africa and the pressure in Botswana, the operations in these countries grew EBITDA by 17% on a combined basis.

In Zimbabwe, volumes were up by an excellent 22%. EBITDA was up by 23%, so you aren’t seeing much in the way of operating leverage there – but you’re certainly seeing plenty of growth. PPC has flagged some margin pressure that will come through in the final months of the year, as there has been a mechanical failure at the Bulawayo factory.

Record dividends from PPC Zimbabwe are just the icing on the cake for this story.


Sabvest’s NAV performed beautifully in 2025 (JSE: SBP)

The dividend has followed suit

Sabvest, one of the best investment holding companies on the JSE, released results for the year ended December 2025.

The company holds 11 unlisted investments, just one listed investment, and two investments currently noted as held-for-sale. Everything is accounted for on a fair value basis, which is why net asset value (NAV) per share is the right performance metric for the group.

NAV per share increased by a delightful 21.9% to R161.05. The dividend per share was 23.8% higher at 130 cents. This was a great year for Sabvest.

Then again, with a 20-year compound annual growth rate (CAGR) in the NAV per share of 19.2% (without dividends), is anyone really surprised?

In terms of portfolio concentration, the two largest holdings (Apex Partners Holdings and SA Bias Industries) contribute R3.1 billion of the total fair value of just over R6 billion. This means that over half of the portfolio sits in just two assets.

Encouragingly, Sabvest has indicated that there might be further investments in the pipeline in 2026. This is a sign of positive sentiment.


Vukile’s Castellana inks another deal in Spain (JSE: VKE)

This adds to the retail portfolio

Vukile Property Fund announced that 99.7%-held Spanish subsidiary, Castellana Properties, is acquiring a 50% share in Splau Shopping Centre.

The centre is located in Barcelona, the second largest city in Spain. This is a tourist hotspot that attracts plenty of footfall. The centre has a strong leisure angle to address this demand, including the largest cinema in Spain with more than 770,000 visitors.

Going to the movies is clearly still a thing in Barcelona!

Here’s another interesting stat: 77% of customers at the centre arrive by car. I’m quite surprised by how high that is, given the level of public transport in Europe.

The gross asset value of the property is €350 million, and there is a mortgage balance of €171.5 million. Castellana is paying €89 million for the 50% share.

Vukile indicates that this deal is earnings accretive for the company.


Nibbles:

  • Director dealings:
    • The sons of the Dis-Chem (JSE: DCP) founders sold shares worth just over R320 million. It looks like the sales were by an entity (or trust – it’s not clear) in which they both have an interest. Dis-Chem also decided it was too much work to include the total value of the sale in the SENS announcement, so I had to literally add up more than 20 trades.
    • A non-executive director of STADIO (JSE: SDO) bought shares worth R198k.
    • The CEO of Libstar (JSE: LBR) bought shares worth almost R100k.
    • Des de Beer is back on the bid, buying Lighthouse Properties (JSE: LTE) shares worth R76k.
  • Putprop (JSE: PPR) has very little liquidity in its stock, so the results for the six months to December 2025 only get a mention down here. HEPS at the property company declined from 28.35 cents to 24.19 cents. This is the inevitable outcome of a mere 3.4% increase in rentals and recoveries vs. an 8.5% increase in property operating costs. These issues were partially mitigated by a 25% reduction in finance costs. Despite the challenges, the dividend per share increased from 7 cents to 8.5 cents.
  • Sirius Real Estate (JSE: SRE) has secured a €300 million revolving credit facility. There are four lenders involved in this facility. With a three-year term and two one-year extension options, there’s very useful flexibility here. There’s also an accordion of up to €100 million, allowing the facility to be increased on the same terms as the initial amount. Pricing and covenants are in line with the original €150 million revolving credit facility, which means a margin of 120 basis points over EURIBOR. Covenants are also largely in line with the 2032 bond. When property funds can raise revolving credit facilities, rather than debt against specific properties, you know they are doing well.
  • Supermarket Income REIT (JSE: SRI) has increased its secured term loan for the joint venture with funds managed by Blue Owl Capital. The facility with a syndicate of banks has been increased by £222 million to £437 million. This is an interest-only facility maturing in June 2028, with two one-year extension options. The cost is fixed for the entire facility at 5.24%. The proceeds will refinance near-term debt maturities, resulting in a loan-to-value ratio for the company of 43%.
  • Orion Minerals (JSE: ORN) has settled the final acquisition consideration for the Okiep Copper Project. This means a further R2.3 million in cash and R12.44 million in shares will change hands. There’s a potential “agterskot” payment down the line based on certain conditions.

Ghost Bites (Libstar | Mr Price | Old Mutual | Primary Health Properties | SPAR | STADIO | Woolworths)

Congratulations to Forvis Mazars in South Africa, strong supporters of Ghost Mail, on their appointment as the auditors of SA Corporate Real Estate (JSE: SAC)!

Libstar is doing so much better than before (JSE: LBR)

Can they keep this up?

Libstar has been walking a difficult path. Normalised HEPS was 82.7 cents in 2019 before the pandemic, and 80.4 cents in 2021 as the pandemic started to subside. But then things went wrong, with normalised HEPS bottoming out at 53.4 cents in 2024.

The good news is that 2025 represents a return to growth, with normalised HEPS of 70.6 cents. They are still well off the 2021 numbers, but this is obviously a big improvement.

Return on Invested Capital (ROIC) of 10.9% in 2025 is better than anything we saw from 2022 to 2024, although it’s still below the 12.5% achieved in 2021. Pre-COVID levels were in the mid-teens, so there’s plenty of runway for further improvement.

The management team is backing themselves to do it, having walked away from negotiations with potential acquirers who they felt were undervaluing the company. Libstar will be hosting a capital markets day (CMD) on 1 April 2026 to explain the full opportunity to the market and why they believe that this isn’t the time to sell the company.

Words like “inflection point” feature in the results presentation and will no doubt be a focus at the CMD as well. The numbers support this narrative – revenue up 8.2%, with gross margin improving by 40 basis points to 22.0%. Normalised operating profit margin improved by 20 basis points to 5.9%. This is encouraging momentum.

Thanks to net finance costs dropping by 11.3% in a period where normalised operating profit increased by 11.0%, HEPS jumped by 21.7% on a normalised basis.

To add to the good news, working capital ratios also improved as inventory levels were reduced. The group is targeting further improvement in the net working capital ratio over the medium-term, which suggests that more cash can be unlocked.

Looking at the segmental split, we begin with Ambient Products (51% of group revenue). Revenue was up 7.4%, gross margin improved by 50 basis points and normalised EBITDA grew 3.1%. This means that they struggled with EBITDA margin pressure in this part of the business, so there is clearly room for improvement here.

In Perishable Products (48% of group revenue), revenue grew by 9.2%, gross margin was up 70 basis points and normalised EBITDA displayed healthy growth of 12.5%. This means that EBITDA margin improved slightly.

At the end of the day, it comes down to pricing power. Ambient Products could only achieve a 1.9% uplift in price and mix, with 5.5% coming from volumes. This immediately puts pressure on margins. Conversely, Perishable Products achieved price and mix increases of 9.1%, while volumes were up just 0.1%.

Guidance for the next 12 to 18 months is an EBITDA margin of 8.5% to 9.5%, vs. the current level of 8.7%. The medium-term target is 9.0% to 10.0%, driven by improvement across both segments.

As a final indication of the improved sentiment, dividend cover has been revised from 3x – 4x to a new target of 2x – 3x. Lower dividend cover means that a higher proportion of profits will be paid out as a dividend.


Mr Price gives more details on the NKD plans (JSE: MRP)

Despite a market presentation (or perhaps because of it?), the share price fell by 4%

Mr Price has been taking plenty of heat for the NKD deal. It’s rare to see such unanimous hatred for a transaction, with Mr Price executing a strategy that is straight outta the Lost Decade in South Africa. Times have changed and people aren’t interested in local management teams doing flashy offshore deals.

To try and explain themselves, Mr Price hosted an investor presentation. I’ll highlight a few of the points, but you should check out the entire deck here.

In 2024, NKD managed an EBIT margin of only 4%. The target by 2030 is to increase this to between 8% and 10%. That’s ambitious.

Combined with a 6.5% compound annual growth rate (CAGR) in net sales from 2024 to 2030, this margin uplift would drive a CAGR in EBIT of 15% to 20%. This would be lovely, obviously. It’s also not the first time that a South African retailer has promised the world to investors.

They expect like-for-like growth to be between 3% and 4% per annum. The rest of the growth would be achieved through store openings, particularly in Germany (around 40% of planned openings). NKD can self-fund this growth.

One of the irritations in the market is the funding of the deal, with net debt to EBITDA (excl. IFRS 16) expected to be 1.5x to 1.75x. There are layers of risks here.

A decrease in the share price of 4%, on a day where the All-Share Index closed 0.6% higher, tells you that the market is still unhappy.

My overall worry is that spicy targets tend to drive a higher valuation. Value creation for shareholders is achieved through paying less than a company is actually worth. With private equity as the sellers on the other side of this deal, I’m sure that much effort was put into convincing Mr Price that not only does NKD have a bright future, but that Mr Price should pay for it accordingly. Therein lies the potential problem.


Old Mutual reflects margin pressure in the life insurance industry (JSE: OMU)

But the real focus this year will be on the bank’s launch performance

Old Mutual reported results for the year ended December 2025. They make for interesting reading.

One of the themes in the life insurance space in the past year has been a change in product mix. Sales might be up, but the value of new business is being severely impacted by a shift in preferences around annuity products. Old Mutual is no exception, with Life APE sales up by 3%, yet value of new business is down by a nasty 52%. This puts the value of new business margin below the target range.

In the short-term book, margins went the other way. Net underwriting margin moved up by 60 basis points to 6.8%, a solid outcome when accompanied by a 7% increase in gross written premiums in that business.

Another highlight is improved inflows into local and offshore platforms.

Interestingly, loans and advances decreased by 4% as Old Mutual took steps to increase the quality of the book (including sales of non-performing loans). This improved the net lending margin by 250 basis points to 12.1%!

Results from operations increased by 13%. Thanks to elevated shareholder investment returns, adjusted headline earnings was up by a juicy 24%.

They flag the Malawian kwacha here, noting that a devaluation of that currency could’ve easily resulted in adjusted headline earnings being up by 11% – 16%. In other words: don’t latch onto the 24% growth and think that it reflects a sustainable rate.

Dividend growth is a useful anchor here, coming in at 8% for the year.

All eyes will be on the banking business. They’ve gone with a soft launch, with the expectation being that public marketing campaigns will kick off in Q2. We learnt from Discovery (JSE: DSY) that it takes a long time for a bank to reach profitability. It feels like the Discovery offering is differentiated in the market. But I’m not sure how Old Mutual will offer something that attracts people away from the numerous other options in this hotly-contested space.

To give you an idea of just how costly it is to launch a bank, return on net asset value was 15.2% including the bank, and would’ve been 18.8% excluding the bank. They are taking a significant risk on the success of this initiative.

What are your thoughts on Old Mutual launching a bank?


Primary Health Properties has grown the dividend by 3% (JSE: PHP)

Keep in mind that this is a hard currency return

Primary Health Properties released results for the year ended 31 December 2025. This was the period in which they merged with Assura to become a much larger healthcare REIT.

For the year ended December 2025, net rental income was up by 49% – but that’s clearly due to corporate activity, not sustainable underlying growth metrics. A good indication of growth would be to use adjusted earnings per share, up 4%. But the best lens of all is the cash quality of earnings, evidenced by a 3% increase in the dividend per share.

This is the company’s 30th anniversary of consecutive dividend growth!

The immediate target is to bring debt back down to more typical levels, as it is common for debt ratios to spike in the aftermath of a transaction. The loan-to-value ratio of 57% is considerably higher than the 48% we saw a year ago. The pressure is compounded by an increase in the average cost of debt, from 3.4% to 3.7%.

In positive news, they’ve delivered over 80% of the annualised transaction synergies. I suspect that the remaining 20% is much harder, though. Other positive corporate news includes progress in joint venture negotiations, including the injection of assets (by a partner) into a joint venture. This would help improve group leverage ratios.


SPAR has announced a voluntary severance programme (JSE: SPP)

I doubt they have much choice, really

When a company is busy with a turnaround, decisiveness is required. SPAR has a lot of work to do, particularly in terms of getting the basics right. And one of those basics, as yucky as it always feels, is to have the right cost base.

Inevitably, this means that people are impacted. The principle here is that it is better to prune the tree rather than watch the entire thing die.

The company hasn’t given any indication of the size of the voluntary severance programme (VSP) that they will be implementing. These programmes typically give people the option to accept a package and go away. If enough people take it, that’s usually the end of it. But if it fails to achieve enough traction, it can be a precursor to a much uglier process: retrenchments that aren’t of a voluntary nature.

May this be the start of better times at SPAR!


STADIO just keeps growing (JSE: SDO)

Here’s another 23% growth in HEPS for you to chew on

STADIO is an excellent local growth story. Demand for tertiary education is strong, as evidenced by results for the year ended December 2025.

Semester 1 saw an increase in student numbers of 9%, while Semester 2 was up by 7%. Together with price increases, this was good enough to boost revenue by 14%. Encouragingly, contact learning revenue grew 15%, and distance learning was up 14%, so the growth is across the board.

EBITDA increased by 21%. The group enjoyed an increase in the adjusted EBITDA margin to 30%. These are strong numbers.

This growth carried through to the bottom of the income statement, with HEPS up by 23%. Core HEPS, a slightly different lens on earnings, increased by 22%.

As always, it’s a good idea to see if the cash followed the earnings. Sure enough, the dividend per share increased by 22%. In addition to the dividend, the company repurchased R75.7 million worth of shares.

With 53,303 students in Semester 2, the group believes it is on track to reach the pre-listing ambition of 56,000 students in 2026. The longer-term goal is to reach 80,000 students by 2030.

That goal is helped by regulations that are paving the way for Private Higher Education institutions to call themselves universities, bridging the perceived quality gap between public and private institutions.

You can’t achieve this kind of growth without investment in the footprint, with the group making capital investments of R303 million during the year. Within that number, R205 million was allocated to the Durbanville campus.

During 2026, they expect to invest a further R294 million across the business. The Durbanville campus is expected to be R110 million of that number.

Interestingly, STADIO is now the official higher education partner to the Springboks. When our stars are done moering people on the field, STADIO is ready to help them dish out a similar performance in the boardroom.

Perhaps those student numbers need to be double-checked though – having met a few of the enormous Boks in the flesh, I wouldn’t blame STADIO if some of them counted as two students!


Woolworths acquires in2food from Old Mutual Private Equity (JSE: WHL)

This is a strong example of vertical integration

When I worked in corporate advisory a decade ago, Old Mutual Private Equity bought a minority stake in in2food. I’m not sure what their original intended holding period would’ve been, but I suspect that a decade is right on the edge of how long a private equity fund can hang around for. COVID no doubt threw a spanner in the works in terms of the exit plan!

The underlying business has a much longer track record than the Old Mutual ownership period, with in2food having supplied Woolworths Foods for over 30 years. In fact, Woolworths is the company’s largest customer.

Thus, it makes a lot of sense that a sale to Woolworths is the preferred exit strategy.

From a Woolworths perspective, this is a vertical integration play that gives them control over more than R5 billion in revenue. They will be the proud owners of eight manufacturing facilities of scale. Most importantly, it looks like the revenue is primarily in private label products (i.e. Woolworths Food house brands), so this gives Woolworths an important competitive edge in the market.

The existing food services and export markets will still be supported. After all, Woolworths is effectively paying for that revenue through this transaction and would be foolish to drop it. It’s also a handy source of diversification.

The price? We don’t know for sure. The deal is so small in the Woolworths context that the transaction isn’t categorisable under JSE rules, so the deal value hasn’t been announced.

But we can make an educated guess…

If I look at competing food businesses in the market, I would guess that in2food’s net profit is somewhere around the R200 million mark based on the indicated revenue of R5 billion. This suggests a likely valuation in the R1 billion to R1.6 billion range.

I must immediately point out that private equity deals are concluded on an EV/EBITDA multiple, not a P/E multiple, as there is usually debt involved. The numbers above are literally just a guess, as they could vary considerably based on the underlying debt (and profit margins, of course).

Woolworths has a market cap of R51 billion, so we know for sure that the deal has to be smaller than R2.55 billion (5% of the market cap), or it would be categorisable. This supports my estimated range.

Either way, it seems like a smart deal!


Nibbles:

  • Director dealings:
    • The CEO of Pan African Resources (JSE: PAN) sold shares worth R3.5 million. He entered into a collar transaction referencing R13.8 million worth of shares, and pledged them as security for a loan of R11.6 million. The collar is a derivative transaction that hedges the value of the shares that have been pledged to the lender.
  • RMB Holdings (JSE: RMH) announced that AttBid has acquired more shares in the group. The concert parties (AttBid and Atterbury Property Fund) now have an aggregate holding of 41.24%.
  • Labat Africa (JSE: LAB) announced a strategic supply agreement between subsidiary Ahnamu Investments (acquired at the end of February) and Shafi Inc FZCO, headquartered in Dubai. The announcement is filled with exciting language around AI and high-performance computing. Essentially, it gives Ahnamu an expanded footprint in international markets. Ahnamu currently makes a profit of R90 million a year and the board believes that this is a “meaningful” step for the company. But what will really count is the profits actually coming through. Good luck to them!
  • Acsion Limited (JSE: ACS) announced that a wholly-owned subsidiary, Hey Joe, has increased a construction contract with a related party by R17.2 million. The related party (KAP – no relation to the listed company of the same name) is owned by the CEO of Acsion and his family. Merchantec has opined that the terms of this related party transaction are fair.
  • Argent Industrial (JSE: ART) has been busy with share repurchases. They’ve repurchased nearly R12 million worth of shares between 23 February and 6 March at an average price of R33.44. This represents 0.66% of total shares in issue, so I expect to see far more repurchases coming through.
  • Greencoat Renewables (JSE: GRP) is also busy with repurchases. In just one day, they repurchased shares worth €255k (around R4.9 million).
  • Just to give some context of the size of the abovementioned repurchases, AB InBev (JSE: ANH) – which is obviously vastly bigger than Argent and Greencoat – repurchased $41 million worth of shares in the space of just one week. That’s over R680 million!

Ghost Bites (MTN | Optasia | South32 | Sun International)

MTN now has over 300 million customers (JSE: MTN)

HEPS has increased by more than 10x year-on-year

2025 will certainly go down as one of MTN’s most memorable years. The share price has more than doubled since the start of 2025, while HEPS for the year increased spectacularly – from 110 cents to 1,274 cents.

It wasn’t that long ago that MTN was talking about emergency balance sheet solutions for MTN Nigeria. This is the same group that had to extend the MTN Zakhele Futhi structure to achieve some value for shareholders. Things can change very quickly in markets like Africa!

Management has undoubtedly played a strong role here, but make no mistake – a result like this is only possible when the macroeconomics pull off a solid recovery. With the dollar having weakened and given the African currencies some breathing room, suddenly everything became easier. Dollar-denominated debt became manageable and so did capex expenditure. With countries like Nigeria and Ghana in better financial health, people in those economies spent more on MTN’s services.

When multiple flywheels are spinning, you get results like these.

Speaking of flywheels, total customers grew by 5.6% to 307.2 million. This means incremental growth of 16.3 million customers! Data customers increased by 9.4%, while data traffic was up 27.0% as usage increased. On the fintech side, MTN saw an incredible 37.6% growth in value of transactions. They’ve now exceeded $500 billion in fintech transaction value!

These are serious numbers.

EBITDA increased by 64.0% on a reported basis, or 36.8% in constant currency. That gives you a very good idea of how favourable the currency moves were in this period.

EBITDA margin as reported was up 11.5 percentage points to 43.5%. In constant currency, it was up 5.4 percentage points to 44.5%.

Adjusted HEPS increased by 67%. This is a more reasonable indication of growth than reported HEPS, which enjoyed a more than ten-fold increase as indicated earlier.

Here’s another exciting growth number: free cash flow increased by 345.5% to R26.9 billion!

Group net debt to EBITDA has improved tremendously, dropping from 0.7x to 0.3x.

Holdco leverage remains an important ratio for MTN, as investors surely haven’t forgotten a time when the company couldn’t upstream the cash from African subsidiaries to the mothership to service debt. Holdco leverage improved marginally from 1.4x to 1.3x. USD-denominated debt is 16% of the mix, while the rest is denominated in rand.

Here at home, MTN South Africa managed service revenue growth of 2.0%. The pressure in the prepaid segment remains an issue for the company, although it is certainly good news for consumers to have so much competition out there.

The gigantic elephant in the room is, of course, Iran. The 49% stake in Irancell is a geopolitical hot potato of note, with MTN currently cooperating in a US Department of Justice grand jury investigation. There are also civil lawsuits in the US.

The market seems to be shrugging off these risks. I guess that’s either the dumbest or the smartest approach possible. Only time will tell.

What is your view on this risk?


Optasia (officially: Channel VAS Investments) is growing rapidly (JSE: OPA)

But eyebrows have been raised by a related party deal

Optasia has released results for the year ended December 2025. The company is still fresh in our market, having listed in 2025 and enjoyed a solid rally before being caught up in the Iran-related market sell-off. The stock is now trading at precisely the IPO price!

If you want to understand the company in proper detail, then I recommend referring back to this podcast with Optasia CEO, Salvador Anglada, at the time of the listing.

Optasia facilitated 44% more credit for its partners in 2025 than in 2024. With the take rate increasing on the platform, this drove group revenue growth of a meaty 76% for the year.

Group adjusted EBITDA of $114.5 million represents a 52% year-on-year increase. They are enjoying higher profits per unit of distributed value, suggesting that the economic efficiency of the platform is improving.

If you exclude the listing costs, normalised net income increased by 57.1%. Without those adjustments, HEPS as reported increased by only 9%.

Adjusted free cash flow increased by 41%, with a conversion rate of 39%. Thanks to the cash flow and the equity raise during the year, net debt to adjusted EBITDA improved from 0.99x to 0.11x.

Micro-lending services were the primary growth driver in 2025, contributing 63% of group revenue thanks to an impressive year-on-year increase of 149%. This means that micro-lending is bigger than airtime credit services for the first time. These things ultimately work together though, with airtime credit services as the initial customer touchpoint.

The default rate increased from 0.9% to 1.2%, reflecting the impact of a larger mix of micro-lending services. These products do carry more risk, but they also have a higher yield.

It all sounds interesting, except for the other announcement on the day that drove some less-than-positive commentary on the socials. Optasia announced the acquisition of Finergi, a “small related party transaction” priced at almost R500 million.

R413 million is payable in cash and R84.6 million is payable in shares, so that related party isn’t very interested in coming along for the ride. They seem far more excited about cashing out.

There’s also a contingent earn out payment of R165.9 million, so the total potential deal value is over R660 million!

Finergi allows prepaid electricity meters to function as digital wallets. Credit access when you top up your electricity is a novel concept. I’m starting to wonder if we will be able to take on more debt when we open our fridges one day to get the milk out!

Finergi has active pilots and integrations across Southern, East and West Africa, with another 10 African countries in “commercial conversations” for expansion. They also intend to expand to Asia.

The announcement is full of commentary around total addressable market and all the other arguments used to justify a valuation of over half a billion rand. Sadly, what they don’t appear to have is profit. And I mean, no profits at all.

Even worse, the net asset value is only R24.5 million. This valuation is big on hope, low on track record.

The controlling shareholder of Finergi, Bassim Haidar, is a related party to Optasia. This means that an independent expert needs to sign off on the deal as being fair. Acting in this capacity, BDO thinks that the valuation is fair.

Even without the earn-outs, it’s priced at roughly 20x book value, with no profits to back up the value. I’m not sure that this is the type of deal that investors were hoping to see with the IPO proceeds.


South32 has officially placed Mozal Aluminium on care and maintenance (JSE: S32)

Smelters cost an absolute fortune to run

After sounding the alarm many times along the way, South32 has executed the plan to put Mozal Aluminium on care and maintenance.

They’ve been working for years to secure a sufficient and affordable power supply beyond March 2026 for this asset in Mozambique. It just hasn’t happened, with Eskom (one of the counterparties in the negotiation) as a very different company to deal with these days.

It shows you how much has changed in our country. Mozal Aluminium has the IDC as a 32.4% shareholder, yet it still didn’t automatically get a special electricity tariff.

It does make me wonder why Merafe (JSE: MRF) has been granted discounted tariffs though. Perhaps the difference is that Merafe employs South Africans and is in South Africa, while the Mozal Aluminium smelter is in Mozambique?

Either way, South32 has spent around $60 million to place the asset into care and maintenance. This includes employee separation costs. Annual care and maintenance costs are around $5 million.

The alumina supplied by the Worsley Alumina refinery will now be sold to third party customers at index-linked prices.


Sun International finds growth again in land-based casinos (JSE: SUI)

As you would expect, the Sunbet business is growing rapidly

Could the bottom finally be in for the casino business? It’s possible, based on the latest results at Sun International.

We begin with the group results for the year ended December 2025. Sun International achieved group income growth of 3.2% including the Table Bay Hotel, or 7.1% excluding it. As you may recall from the recent Growthpoint (JSE: GRT) numbers, this hotel closed for a massive R1 billion overhaul.

Group continuing adjusted EBITDA (excluding the Table Bay Hotel) rose by 2.8%. This means that adjusted EBITDA margin declined from 27.9% to 26.6%.

Net debt has reduced from R5.2 billion to R5.0 billion. Net interest costs fell by a tasty 19% year-on-year, showing the dual benefit of reduced debt and a decrease in borrowing costs.

HEPS increased by 38.7%, although adjusted HEPS (up 6.4%) is the right number to look at. Interestingly, one of the items they adjust for in this regard is a R31 million non-recurring strategic review. Consultants aren’t cheap!

As further evidence that this is a mid-single digits story, the ordinary dividend for the year was up 6.5% to 424 cents per share. In a display of significantly improved sentiment, there’s also a special dividend of 100 cents per share.

As always, a closer look at the segments is valuable.

The land-based casino performance is surely the most interesting element of this story. Gross gaming revenue was down by 2.6% for the year, a much slower decline than the broader market (down 6.3%). This means they improved their market share to 46.0%.

But here’s the real nugget: Q4 saw an increase in gross gaming revenue of 4.0%. This is the first positive growth rate we’ve seen since Q2 2023. I’m still bearish on the overall market, but perhaps Sun International has finally stopped digging for the bottom.

Special mention must go to Sunbet, with a spectacular 76% increase in income. This part of the business has now overtaken Sun Slots in revenue. If it keeps up this growth rate, it will soon be bigger than Resorts and Hotels as well!

Adjusted EBITDA (before management fees) jumped from R355 million to R744 million at Sunbet. There’s nothing quite like casually doubling your profits in one year.

Unless there’s a significant change in consumer behaviour (or regulations), the growth in Sunbet looks set to continue. Growth of 40.8% in unique active players shows you how quickly this form of entertainment is growing. There are many concerns in the market around online gambling, so we will need to see how this all shakes out.

The growth at Sun Slots is far more tame, but still in the green. Income was up 2.0% year-on-year. This part of the business contributed adjusted EBITDA of R334 million, so it’s now been left in the dust by Sunbet.

The group has made a number of executive appointments, including bringing in executives from international companies. It’s probably not a bad idea to have as many different ideas around the table as possible.

In Resorts and Hotels, average room rates and revenue per available room (RevPAR) were positive contributors, especially at Sun City after its refurbishment. Excluding the Table Bay Hotel, the group achieved 6.9% growth in rooms, food and beverage revenue.

The share price closed 10.6% higher on the day. I’m not surprised by this, as the company has managed a strong set of numbers here.


Nibbles:

  • Director dealings:
  • Hulamin (JSE: HLM) has renewed the cautionary announcement related to the potential disposal of Hulamin Extrusions. They’ve been trading under cautionary since 18 August 2025.

The Finance Ghost Plugged in with Capitec: Ep 9 (Innovation, engineered by the Van Greunens)

Introducing Olympia Holdings founders George Van Greunen and Manie Van Greunen

Any business owner knows that software can make or break a business. And when software is built by entrepreneurs, for entrepreneurs, the benefits are even clearer.

Like many great businesses, Olympia Engage was created to solve the challenges its founders faced in their previous businesses. With hands-on experience managing large teams and running performance and incentivisation programmes, brothers Manie and George Van Greunen set out to build digital solutions that address these challenges.

In episode 9 of The Finance Ghost Plugged in with Capitec, get ready to learn from these software ‘brogrammers’ about how Olympia Engage uses various techniques to improve adoption rates, create internal alignment and support measurable performance.

Episode 9 covers:

  • The difficulties companies face when tackling performance management processes, including tasks like leader boards and performance reviews
  • How Olympia Engage uses elements of CRM software and customer nurturing systems to align performance to measurable results
  • Practical insights into implementation and the change management that comes with rolling out new systems
  • The expected impact of AI on the software industry
  • The debate between diversification and focus in SME service offerings

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.

Listen to the podcast here:

Read the transcript:

The Finance Ghost: Welcome to this episode of the Finance Ghost Plugged in with Capitec. What a fantastic season we’ve had. I’ve gotten to speak to all kinds of different entrepreneurs, actually doing really interesting things. 

And in the most recent episode, I also got to chat to the executives at Capitec who have actually built Capitec Business from where it started as Mercantile Bank, which Capitec then acquired, into Capitec Business as we know it today. 

My guests on the show today have actually been with Capitec as their primary business bank since the Mercantile days – and now Capitec. So they’ve also walked quite a long road with the group, which probably says something. 

That’s Manie Van Greunen and George Van Greunen, both the co-founders of Olympia Holdings. Manie, George, thank you so much for doing this. 

George, I’m not sure where in the country you are at the moment. Manie mentioned that he’s currently in the Free State in what looks like a rather pretty, almost farmhouse-style kitchen. Very nice. So, probably a bit more interesting than where I’m sitting right now. So welcome to the show.

George Van Greunen: Thank you very much. I’m sitting in Durbanville in our head office in Cape Town, so thanks for that.

The Finance Ghost: Nice. And Manie, you’re in the Free State right now?

Manie Van Greunen: Yes, thank you very much. Because we’re with a client in the Free State on a farm. We’re actually assisting them with some implementation and services that we do over here. 

It’s actually awesome to be out and about in the farm area where it’s quiet, and you’ve got animals roaming around. So it’s just a totally different view. I’m very blessed to be here and very thankful as well. And thank you very much for the opportunity.

The Finance Ghost: Yeah, fantastic. I love that. It’s good to have you guys here. Thank you and thanks, Manie, for making time while travelling as well. That really helps. 

I’m excited to dig into the story of Olympia because my understanding is that at the core of this thing, sits a problem that a lot of companies face. Which is stuff like making performance reviews interesting; to actually get it to really work for employees. And we’ll dig into a lot of these things. 

My experience working in corporates has been that when people hear “performance review”, there’s almost this audible groan in the room. I’ve seen all kinds of these things, ranging from very mundane tick-box exercises (where it is literally a tick box, and nothing actually ever really rides on it, let’s be honest), through to very spicy 360-reviews in a more bonus-driven environment (where you can get some nasty surprises through the performance process). 

You can also get a lot of validation for the effort you’ve put in in the past year. 

And of course, everything in between, from absolutely useless ones, to those ending in tears, and good outcomes where you actually get a chance to really learn and grow. So, it’s a pretty interesting space to be providing solutions. 

And you guys have got some adjacent businesses on the staffing side as well, which we’ll definitely dig into. Before we get to what Olympia does, just give us the backstory to this business, how it was started. That’s always a good place to begin.

Manie Van Greunen: Thank you, Ghost. Olympia was founded in 2017. We’re based in Cape Town like George mentioned at the head office, and we did it with a clear idea: technology could fundamentally change how organisations manage people, performance and customers. 

Although we’re a software development company, we built digital solutions – and we’ve seen all these recurring challenges that companies have. Especially when it comes to performance and how they manage their people, it’s a little bit challenging when they want to manage their clients. We look at how they manage them correctly and stay in touch to actually build a positive relationship with their clients. 

With building the company, we basically got to the point where we started Olympia to engage through this process. And that is our performance management and engagement platform with a built-in CRM component to it. 

So it sounds fairly funny with all the components together. But we’ll go through, in a bit more detail, how it actually fits (together) as a package. How it’s been assisting their clients through growing their business, making sure they manage their people correctly, even customer enablement, and how they can actually be closer to their clients and give them a better service. Which, in return, brings more profitability to the companies. 

At the same time, it also actually helps the internal people to manage the performance side – how the people can improve and do things better. 

We’ve learned a lot ourselves. Prior to this business, we had a 140-strong staff complement with people sitting all over South Africa, and some of them being based abroad. And our biggest challenge was how to make sure that our people felt engaged, and part of a team. And then also – how do we manage their performance reviews? 

It becomes a massive cost exercise to fly people all over, especially managers – to go and sit with the team and do performance management reviews one-on-one. That is how the engagement platform actually originated; how we started implementing it for ourselves internally – to make sure we can actually get that process to the point where we can save money. At the same time, giving the people the best outcome – both for the company and for the employee

It’s not a bias thing – it’s actually an interactive process where people can engage from the start through the 365 days. At the end of the day, when the review is done, they’re all on the same page, and are able to manage properly (prior to anything that might be a big concern or something that could be a big impact on the performance of the business or the employees themselves). 

That is where we as a company started from. We’re very, very excited about what we offer to our clients. At the same time, we’re also excited about what we offer as part of the internal process to our own people, and how we can manage them. We also see the results from implementing the system to support them as well. 

In a nutshell, that is who we are. It’s George and I, and then we’ve got a very nice staff complement that has been with the company for many years. And that’s a nice thing for us is how the people integrated into the business and worked with us. They grew and saw the vision of what we wanted to achieve, and that got us to the point where we are currently today.

The Finance Ghost: Fantastic. I’m so tempted to ask if it’s a “plumber’s tap-type” situation and if your own internal performance review process with your own staff works so well. No, I’m just kidding. 

Well, what is cool is to see how you went and built a business that feels like it solves problems that you had in your previous business, which I think is great. And it’s amazing how many entrepreneurial stories actually follow that kind of path, where it’s saying, “I wish this thing existed, hence I’m going to build it”. 

That’s basically what The Finance Ghost is. I looked at it and thought, well, I wish that people could have better access to investment insights and a more experienced business voice writing about the markets, as opposed to a lot of traditional-type media outlets. And here we are today. So that’s what you’ve got to do sometimes – you’ve just got to build the thing that you wish existed in the world. 

And the other point that you’ve raised there, Manie, which I like, is the concept of avoiding a negative surprise around the time of a performance review, because that is actually such a strong point. 

If you arrive for your performance review and that’s when you find out that all is not well, then it’s actually your manager’s fault more than it’s your fault. Because you just haven’t been given ongoing feedback, and you haven’t been given a chance to make it work. You’re probably being managed out of the organisation, if that’s happening to you. That’s the reality.

Manie Van Greunen: Correct. If one person could do everything in a business, that would have been the ultimate. But we know it’s not possible – and that’s why we need people in a business. The problem sometimes is that a manager or a person in the business doesn’t always give the feedback to management quickly enough, or to the staff itself. It creates a problem; it creates a negative impact when it comes to performance reviews. 

And we know that when people do say, yeah, we’re going to do a performance review, it’s like, “Oh, we’re really going to have to do this now again”. People don’t always believe in it because it’s most of the time a one-sided scenario. 

But in saying that, we’ve learned through this. And you rightly said that we actually went through the pitfalls of sending people all over doing things, trying to make sure we do performance management properly to make it a reciprocal thing, not just for the business, but for the employees as well. 

And it took us a bit of time, but we got to the point where we got a system that actually looked after both parties. They feel part of it – it’s not always for the purposes of getting people engaged in other systems or products or anything like that, but at the end of the day, it basically brings them closer to the business when they feel that you’re actually doing something to make sure they feel engaged. Helping them try to grow within the business and doing things that assist them as well.

Because we know – if people are successful, the company is successful – it’s a reciprocal thing. And I think that is where we’re very excited about how we can help people – by achieving that in the long term.

The Finance Ghost: Yeah, I like that. So Manie, I can see you kind of naturally step into the spokesperson role. But George, I don’t doubt that you’ve been absolutely integral to this journey. Maybe give me a sense, George, of the roles you each play and why you feel like it’s been a good team. Was your previous business also the two of you together? Have you been doing this for a long time?

George Van Greunen: We’ve been doing this since 2002. I think why we work so well together, as you mentioned, is that Manie is more from a sales perspective; a spokesperson role. I’m more on a technical side, driving the back end. I think that’s what’s helping us to grow the business in the way we do. 

If we were the same type of people, we might have bumped heads a bit. But in this case, we’ve got good, defined roles – so we can actually achieve what we need to achieve.

The Finance Ghost: I wanted to say the clearly defined role aspect is actually something that’s come through on this podcast season before, because we’ve had, for example, married couples who have done businesses together, siblings, friends, business partners – whatever the case may be, it always feels like the road to success is to have these clearly defined roles rather than if you both bring exactly the same skills. Then all you’re doing is: same skill set, double the overhead. You’re not actually building something complementary.

You need someone who fixes your blind spots. That’s what inevitably makes a good team. 

And of course, so much of that comes through in performance reviews, right? It’s about saying, “What are your KPIs, what is your job, what do you bring to this machine – and how do you make it better?” and then you get judged accordingly. That’s how this entire thing works. That’s how organisations function. 

I think in understanding more about Olympia, I want to move into how you guys are very much a technology company, first and foremost. Software seems to be central to what you do. Exciting space. But my feed on X (previously Twitter) at the moment is AI slop after AI slop after AI slop. And a whole lot of posts about how software is about to get eaten by AI, and Software-as-a-Service is dead. I’m sure, like with most things, it’s an extreme view and, whilst there might be a little bit of truth to it, I do think that it’s way more complex than that. 

I want to talk about that later, but in order to get to that conversation, I need to ask you more about some of the solutions, specifically around the digital solutions that you offer.

You’ve touched on some of the problems that you solve. But maybe for someone listening to this, who’s going, “Oh, that’s interesting”, can you just give us a bit of a lay of the land in terms of the actual software solutions that you do offer? And then, I’m super keen to understand how you do that and the role that AI might play in that, in years to come. So let’s start with the solutions themselves.

Manie Van Greunen: 100%. We describe ourselves as a technology company first because of the software at the core of everything we do. We have a team doing different things in the business. But we build digital platforms, develop custom software, and help organisations implement systems that drive measurable performance and outcomes. 

We want to make sure that the systems we do take out to clients are user-friendly. Things where people can see the value – that they can use and immediately get results from – that can actually make a huge impact in the business and the system as well. 

So a key differentiator for us is the combination of the CRM system and the customer nurturing part of the app itself – built-in with the performance management and the reward system. So we know there are a lot of companies doing CRM, and there are a lot of companies doing performance management. There are people doing reward systems. But we’ve actually put this all together in one. 

So it helps to manage the staff performance goals and productivity in real time. It sounds too good to be true, but we try to get something where people can instantly, on a leaderboard, on the dashboard, see how it actually tracks within a business from a company perspective. 

To be able to visually see where these pain areas, or areas that they need to address, makes a huge difference. Especially if you want to grow your business in a positive way, make sure that your revenue improves, and that everything that you do is benefitting both parties. 

We also offer software development, testing, implementation consulting, and ongoing platform support. We do a lot of various things in the software area.

Testing is quite critical as well. You have to test something before you take it live. And most companies will know that if they’ve done internal projects. If you do not test properly and you go live, and something happens, you will 99% of the time lose people’s interest or the customer’s interest, because they don’t want to sit with the app or anything they use that’s not working (or it’s giving them problems the whole time) or anything like that. Then it becomes a negative. So we try to move away from it. 

So we do proper testing, and we’ve got a massive amount of experience in that area. And then we’ve got very good developers (from a development perspective) to support the process, but also support our customers. So it becomes a nice family-type team business that we hand to our clients, and we actually give them the benefit of it as well. 

Moving companies from a manual, fragmented process to real-time, data-driven performance across both people and customers is ultimately one of our big goals. To make sure we assist customers in achieving that as well.

The Finance Ghost: Interesting. That was quite cool to hear. I think there was a farm vehicle reversing in the background there? But you are literally on a farm. You are there getting to know their businesses, for better or worse, for farm vehicles or otherwise. 

And I love that Venn diagram that you referenced there. CRM, customer-nurturing came through, performance management, rewards. I can tell that this is software by entrepreneurs for entrepreneurs. It speaks directly to the lifeblood of any business, which is revenue. Anyone who has run a business is very, very aware that you manage from revenue down, because if there’s no revenue, then you don’t need any of the other stuff.

So if your performance management is not directly addressing how you either make money or actively support someone making money, then it just doesn’t make sense in a small business. Big organisations can get away with huge compliance teams that are very far away from the customers, which is necessary for many of those organisations. They’re either highly-regulated, or multinational. They have a lot of complexities that create that need. 

But for a lot of SMEs and entrepreneurs, they need stuff that is actually linked to revenue. So I think that’s a pretty interesting take on it. Trying to link the software to the actual lifeblood of the business. Right?

Manie Van Greunen: You’re 100% spot on there, I must say, apologies – like we say, business has to go on, and people need to make sure that they’re productive and actually get their business growing. So it’s an interesting journey for us, being part of the farming industry, helping them as well.

You’re absolutely right in saying that there are so many things that impact any business from a growth perspective. And if you don’t make money, what’s the future of the business? The main thing is, people need to believe in the future – and obviously be part of that growth to make sure that both themselves and the company are successful.

The Finance Ghost: You did warn me that a bokkie might find its way into this podcast. That would be an unusual interruption. So far, we’ve only had a farm vehicle, but it’s certainly authentic.

Let’s move on then, into gamification, which is one of the tools that you do use to drive engagement. And this tells me that companies struggle to actually get employees to use these digital tools. 

Again, I have got experience in really big corporates and they would go to great lengths to get people to adopt the tools, et cetera. There is a carrot and stick approach, right? There’s the “You will do this, or…” approach, which is one way to run a business, I guess, and the other way is to try to make it a bit more enjoyable.

There’s a spectrum. I would argue that either end is probably wrong. You want to be somewhere in the middle, but it’s obviously nicer if you can add some gamification elements and that kind of thing. Maybe walk us through the leaderboards, for example, which speaks to competitive organisations, which I think drives better performance. 

Maybe just talk us through some of the tools that you use to actually improve adoption in these organisations, which sounds like it’s one of your key selling points of the system.?

Manie Van Greunen: The biggest challenge is adoption. I used to be in different industries before; always been in sales as well. How do you measure people? From a sales perspective, I want to sell, I don’t want to work on systems. And my response was, “Please don’t give me something easier to do if I have to spend more time with it, I sell less” – whatever the case might be.

But what we’ve tried to do is bring a system together for the people to be able to do things quickly and efficiently. They don’t have to spend all day on it. 

We’re not replacing the current systems they have. We actually either integrate with them or actually complement them. But what we do is, we try to make it a quick, very easy process where they can just log, and do what they need to do, and go and do the sales at the company, and actually promote themselves and grow. 

That forms part of any partner business – a finance role, HR, or any part in the business – will get the benefit of doing it in a very quick, easy way. From a performance perspective on the daily task, from a work perspective, they need to do so.

We know that companies invest in digital tools, but employees and teams don’t always use these consistently.

So we’ve had that same problem where people say, you know, “We’re not going to take part of this because we don’t feel the benefit of this”. The adoption rate sometimes is a bit slow, but what we try to do is to make it a little bit exciting, but also at the same time try to get all these things together that it makes sense for somebody to use it. So some of our customers, in the beginning gave a lot of pushback, and said, “Oh no, we’re not going to use this because you know what, we know what we’re doing”. 

And funnily enough… what helps is if you have a leaderboard placed in a strategic place in a company (a boardroom or in a cafeteria, wherever people are usually getting together to talk a bit, and everybody’s faces are on that leaderboard). If the person who’s not really wanting to engage is not there, at a point they get to the stage where say, “You know what? I would actually like to have my face up there. I would like to participate because I feel a little bit left out now”.

And then they see it’s not saying they have to do this. It’s about trying to be part of a team, wanting to do things together. And the way we achieve this, through gamification, provides a very broad spectrum of how you can do things. 

We know that there are different ways of doing gamification. What we do from our side to help the client, help the employee to actually achieve this, is to use leaderboards. Leaderboards provide an effective tool to see how people are progressing, how they’re competing with each other, and how they’re achieving things – where there are quick problem areas you can address. 

Because you’ll see if somebody’s not engaging, they’re not going to be on a leaderboard – or they’re going to have a 0% on the leaderboard. Those are the things you target and work on to uplift that employee and make sure they achieve what they need to, and see where there’s a problem you can fix. 

We do goal tracking,so there are certain goals they have to achieve. We use team and collaboration tools within our product. They can work as teams together; achieve certain goals together. That makes it so much more attractive when people can see they’ve done something and they can see the result visually as well. 

This is active management – we have the management looking into this, assisting and driving support to the employee to say, “You know what, I’m management, but I’m also getting measured on this”. So, you know, we work together, we made this successful, and then we’ve got a reward mechanism built into it. So if you achieve certain goals and certain targets, there is a reward system that’s built into it. 

But it’s totally up to the company side how they manage it. So we don’t dictate and say you have to do this as a reward. We advise, and we can guide, but we have certain reward processes built into it. It’s a cash reward system. And there are different ways of just giving a thumbs-up or even a gold badge or a silver badge or whatever they achieve. 

People don’t always just need a financial reward; they sometimes need recognition. And unbelievably to say, people sometimes sit in the business, they never get an “Oh, thank you, you’ve done a good job”, or “Thank you for this”, or “You know what, well done, you’ve achieved this”. They actually appreciate that. So we try to improve and enhance and help people to get to that, to be able to help the staff in different ways from a reward perspective as well. 

That’s trying to make sure that we keep the staff and the business motivated and aligned. And it is sometimes difficult, but once you’ve got that process embedded, it’s a free-flowing system people get used to, and work on it very quickly and very easily as well. 

And on the other side, the workflow and the engagement tracking help ensure that the customers are actively nurtured rather than passively managed. With the CRM site, we’ve picked up a lot of clients sitting with a huge amount of Excel sheets with line data. 

It’s not helping them much because all the data is sitting on Excel. We know how it works. You know, you’re not always an Excel expert or getting onto the system and trying to remember things, when was the last dated birthday or anything like that. 

You can import that into the system and immediately you’ve got access to all those clients. 

You can nurture them, and you can work with them, and it tracks what you’ve done with the client and you could ease through it. So there’s a lot of things that give that benefit for how you grow yourself in the business, how you grow your clients and actually make everybody successful. 

And ultimately it’s about making performance, both employee and customer, visible, measurable and actionable in real time. And that is the key thing. If you have that combination right, it boils down to the bottom line, and you actually achieve better performance and reward, at the end of the day. 

George Van Greunen: I just wanted to add to what Manie was saying. Once you’ve got that leaderboard on, it becomes healthy competition because it’s a human thing. If you first and I’m second and we’ve got a Mauritius trip that’s coming up, I want to push to be first and you want to stay first because you want to get it. So suddenly the employee scores and the company scores.

The Finance Ghost: My cousin married an ex-air force pilot. He now flies commercial internationally and he had this great comment about surviving the air force where he said: “The best way to survive is don’t come first, don’t come last and don’t attract attention”. Good survival instinct there. Although I’ve got to say, if coming first gets you to Mauritius, then maybe people would see that a little bit differently. They might aim for the top of the leaderboard. 

Another fun story is one of my first bosses in my financial services career, he had this great line where he said to me, “Since money was invented, there’s only one way to say thank you”. Which has basically stayed with me for life. 

It’s pretty funny, but it’s also not how a lot of people want to be managed. If you’re in a very money driven environment like investment banking, then sure, I don’t think it’s about gold stars and recognition, I think it’s about bonuses. 

But for most industries, a lot of it is about how you feel at work and the amount that you’re contributing and everything else. And it’s a mix of these things and it’s about managing the human being. That’s what makes it so interesting, is people are different.

Maybe that’s a good point for me to bring this new world of AI into this. AI is very different to people. AI doesn’t need to get a pat on the head and for you to say “well done” and get a bonus. Although a lot of the way these models are written, they seem to flourish actually from basically blowing smoke up your own you-know-what and then getting it back from you. That’s a story for another day. 

What I want to understand is, as a software business, which is what you guys are at the end of the day – I keep reading as an investor about how AI is going to cause a lot of trouble in this world, etc.

Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t. You guys are the experts here. I’m dead keen to get your insights because I think it’s relevant to anyone listening to the show.

What’s your view on how AI might either impact or improve your business, perhaps? And what are you seeing from clients? Are they asking you about it, or is it a bubble on my social media that hasn’t quite made it into SMEs yet?

Manie van Greunen: AI is going to shift software from being a system of record to a system of intelligence. Your question right at the end is from a client perspective, wherever we go, that’s on the tip of their tongue. They always want to ask, “Have you got AI integrated in the system? What can AI bring to the party?”

It is inevitable that they have to basically adapt from a business perspective because that is the way of the future. We still believe that AI can’t replace everything. So it’s always going to have to be that human touch. There’s going to be things that we as people think of differently, and that will evolve over time. It’s a big thing on everybody’s mind, and if you’re not going to go that route, you’re probably going to be left out in the dry. 

In performance management, AI will definitely predict this engagement, recommend interventions and automate coaching insights. So you can just imagine the value of that when people can use some of these AI tools to actually assist them with a performance journey, if you want to call it that. Where they can get the systems to implement, and at the same time roll it out to the staff in a very positive way. 

You know, we’re not saying AI must replace it. AI doesn’t know your business; you know your business. You need to have a lot of input in that to actually achieve that. But it will definitely help.

In the CRM system; customer management AI will definitely personalise, nurture, predict and optimise sales pipelines. And it will be a quick way to try and get the people to understand where there are gaps and where there are seeds they need to look at and enhance. 

Unfortunately, AI… I’ve had my thoughts about AI for a long time in positive and negative ways. It’s not something where we as a company can say, “Okay, I know we’re not going to go that route, we’d be fools not to do that”. We’re actually (to a certain extent) very excited about it – because we’ve seen (its value) in small things when we did use it – and it did make a huge difference. And that excites me.

Where it’s going to end up, that’s a different question. The technology evolves so quickly, and these AI tools are actually amazing.

SaaS companies that integrate AI deeply into workflows will thrive, and the people that are really doing it are seeing the results on a daily basis. Those that remain static with dashboards eetc. will struggle. We try to be in tune with the times and wherever that journey takes us, it’s always exciting because it gives us an opportunity to look at things differently. 

The current market reflects uncertainty about business models. Intelligent software is only increasing, and bringing AI into it is just going to give the market that opportunity to actually do things quicker and do things differently. Being in business for quite a while, when it started off, I just said, “AI – what is this going to be?”. 

Looking into what the companies achieved and how it’s actually helped personally, not just even in our app and business and certain things that I needed to get some insight into, it was amazing the quickness of it, now it can actually help you. So ya, from that point of view it’s inevitable. 

My view is that we have to adapt to that, and any company out there has to adapt.

And I’d love to flip this back to you a little bit. What do you see? How is AI changing the way leaders manage people and customers in the future?

The Finance Ghost: It is interesting. In my world, I’ve been trying to use it more for research because it helps a lot – the natural language questions versus searching by keyword, I think that just comes more naturally. That’s why it’s called natural language, right? It’s because you’re asking a question to the machine that you would have asked your friend next to you. Now you can just ask your AI. 

Quality of answers varies, I have found. I gave myself two days where I basically tried to work almost exclusively with Copilot in Microsoft. It just makes sense in my business to use Copilot.

I fed it a whole lot of my writing – my intention is never that it does the output because then I’m going to lose interest in my own business very quickly. My writing will start to sound like AI, which sounds like everyone else, which is exactly the way to make yourself redundant. But I did want to see what it was actually capable of.

I see it as a research tool, and it was a little bit exhausting to use, to be honest. For that day, I found that I got maybe some additional insights. But you have to sift through so much stuff, and no matter how much you tell it to just give you quick answers and to not put all the fluff and everything else (into it), you can see how much design has gone into trying to make this thing sound like the nicest person you’ve ever spoken to in your whole life. “And aren’t you just great? And of course you would ask that question, because you’re so clever”. 

It’s a bit gross, actually, in some respects. And I know that the different systems will do different things, and you can obviously tell it to do different things and everything.

I’ve seen a lot of interesting stuff online. Claude seems to be super powerful (what people are doing with integrations into Excel and PowerPoint). I think back to how much of my time as a junior analyst in investment banking was spent on that stuff and how much of that might now go away. 

And I guess my overarching worry is around junior staff. And I just hope that we don’t get to a world where 20-somethings – who have gone the route of becoming a professional in something – actually can’t find work because no one is hiring them (because they’re hiring AI instead). 

Where will tomorrow’s professionals then come from? That would be a big mess. And I think there is going to be quite a big mess that will have to get sorted out from a regulatory perspective. No one really knows. 

But I also don’t buy the story that someone in a finance team somewhere is going to sit and “vibe code” a solution instead of using their accepted enterprise-level, SaaS solution for finance. I think there are a lot of skunk-work-type projects going on out there that are driving this demand for AI. 

We know that a lot of it is just this big circular reference right now of Microsoft, OpenAI, Nvidia and friends. How much of it is real? No one really knows. 

I can see that there will be some application of this thing. I actually saw a meme on the socials this morning because obviously my feed is just full of AI now. And it was a cartoon of a farmer speaking to a horse. He said to the horse, “Don’t worry, you won’t be replaced by the tractor. You’ll be replaced by the horse that learns how to use the tractor”.

Didn’t help the horse so much, did it? Humans are not horses, of course. We’re hopefully a bit more adaptable. It’s a lot to think about. It’s a hectic thought process to go through.

Manie Van Greunen: I agree with you. The big thing is, there’s the other side of it as well that enhances people, to make sure that they grow. Because a lot of people want to be stagnant in one position. This is sometimes going to force people to get out of that comfort zone and actually start growing. So, there’s a negative side and a positive side. I think that’s more the positive side.

And within our application, we’re starting to use that to actually build people, not just user-tested AI replacing people, if I can put it that way.

The Finance Ghost: That’s the right way to think about it.

Obviously the two of you are very focused on systems and people, and I think just doing things the right way. I think that comes through a lot. And in your choice of bank, I do want to touch on that.

You were previously with Mercantile and then you obviously stayed with them as Capitec acquired Mercantile. Again, for someone listening to this, go back and listen to the previous episode in this series where I got to speak to top execs at Capitec Business about building that bank. Some fascinating stories and some really deep insights into Capitec’s DNA. 

And let’s face it, Capitec is the best business story in democratic South Africa. The numbers are what they are. That’s the reality. So you guys have stuck with them from the Mercantile days into Capitec business and all the success they’ve had.

I’m just curious, as systems-type people, you’ve obviously liked what you’ve seen, right?

Manie Van Greunen: Yes. As far as that goes, I must say it’s actually been a pleasurable journey for us.

When we actually signed up with Mercantile right in the beginning, we knew that they were a business bank, something different from the traditional ABSA and the rest of the banking out there. We never envisioned that Capitec was going to take over Mercantile Bank. But the journey just grew better and better. 

From Mercantile moving to Capitec bank, that was a pleasurable, enjoyable move for us. The way that Capitec manages the bank, the Capitec app itself – it’s all so user-friendly. The way they treated us – we probably wouldn’t have grown our business to the point where we are without them. They were a big part of our business. They were a big part of how we actually achieved things. 

I’m sitting here in the Free State with a farmer – we had the same discussion just before the podcast about Capitec and said how easy it is actually to go and open a bank account with them, how to do a business account, and the way the system just fits in together. 

We’re doing system applications and software that people can use. I think they can learn a lot from the Capitec Bank’s platform itself. It is so user-friendly, it’s actually so nice to use. 

And then it comes down to the people. We’ve had a lot of dealings with different people within Capitec Bank, from a personal perspective on just Capitec and then in Capitec Business. And the service has been great. All the banks are following them. I think they are leaders in what they do. 

And personally, (in my experience with) Capitec, with a Global One account in the personal side and how they do it on the business side, they stay ahead of the bunch. They do things differently; they’re innovative. And we like that because that’s what we want to do. We try to be innovative and do things differently. And we learn a lot from them as well in that regard.

The Finance Ghost: Absolutely. I’ve read T.J. Strydom’s book about Capitec, Stalking Giants. It’s a worthwhile read. One of the biggest takeaways that I got from it was that they really focused on getting a few things absolutely right. And it’s a great example of that strategy. I know, speaking for myself and looking at your business, this is where I want to ask my last question with the time that I have with you guys – it’s around building out different parts of a business.

All of us have that feeling where you need a little bit of diversification, right? It’s one thing to build a very big business that is focused. And obviously, if what you’re focusing on works beautifully, then that’s the dream.

Entrepreneurs have that optimism, but we also all have that fear where something goes wrong. And if you’ve only built one line of business, that can be lethal.

Something that’s interesting with your business is that you do have some revenue diversification angles, which is common. It’s something adjacent to what you’re doing. I’ve seen placements, I’ve seen outsourcing. 

I wanted to end off with firstly the logic there, why you do this; and then secondly, advice you have for other entrepreneurs on the need to balance focus versus diversification. Because I struggle with this myself, basically every day.

Manie Van Greunen: It’s a thing that we also sometimes struggle with. But in our life, in being in business, we’ve made some good decisions, we’ve made some bad decisions, we bumped our heads. The one thing that always comes back to us is the saying, “Don’t keep all your eggs in one basket”.

In saying that, we don’t mean you have to open multiple businesses. That’s also a good thing. If you do open multiple businesses, please just open them with Capitec Bank because they’re going to take you places in any case.

But in saying that, if we just did software development, it’s a long process. Things have changed over time. Apps are being developed a bit quicker as well. But we realised many, many years ago that there are different areas that support the whole process. From offering total outsourced solutions (development from beginning-to-end, to deliverables where they take the app live, like a one-stop shop – we can actually help them with that), to just giving them a resource. They might be in demand for somebody can help them with the internal projects they want to do. 

In our previous business we also had placements of a lot of people in different areas. Most of them were in the development space, but they were also in the business requirement space; even the testing space within different areas within the IT infrastructure and the business side.

When we do technology – we need to speak to developers, we need to speak to business, we need to make sure we get all these parties together to make sure everything is successful. 

Apart from the app development (Olympia Engage), we also have the outsourcing of projects, placements of resources, where we assist customers to achieve what they want. We personally search for these people, usually for a network of people who we know can give an immediate benefit to their client. But also people that we know personally who could assist. We don’t know all the people in the market, but we try to help people with people that we’ve dealt with in the last 20, 30 years, that can make a difference.

For entrepreneurs like us in the business, diversification works when it deepens your ecosystem. So stay close to your core capability by staying disciplined about execution, and ensure new services reinforce your strategy and your strengths.

In our case, we are very strong in the app space, and in the software development space where we developed our apps. We also support that with complementary areas. We make sure that the whole offering is a successful and enjoyable experience to clients. 

At the same time, the client gets the benefit of having access to very good people. It also gives you a little bit of space in the business so that if your development side is going a bit slowly, you have a different income stream that you can tap into from resourcing as well.

Helping customers to get the right people offers a little bit of a different view. I always say to companies out there, if you’re good at something, you stick to that. But always look at areas that are complementary to what you do, and you can actually offer a service that’s an income generator for your business as well.

It makes a huge impact, especially during quiet times in the business. And we all know we all go through that unfortunately. But it also keeps you on your toes to make sure that you actually grow your business.

The Finance Ghost: Yeah, the plan is always to focus on what you’re really good at. But it’s that Mike Tyson quote, right? “Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth”. And when life punches you in the mouth, having a bit of diversification, having another mouth is quite nice. The one that hasn’t been punched today!

That’s life as an entrepreneur. Something that Capitec understands, I understand, and you clearly understand as well. 

I think that’s probably all we have time for. I’m keen to direct people to the right place if they’d like to learn more about Olympia and chat to you guys about the services that you offer. What is the best way for someone to contact you and find out more?

Manie Van Greunen: They can go to our website, www.olympiahld.com, or they can contact me or George very easily at manie@ompiahld.com or george@olympiahld.com, and we’ll gladly assist where we can. We can’t assist with everything, (but) we can send people in the right direction. 

From our side, thank you very much for the opportunity. We were very excited to be part of this journey, with the whole business, with you now, with Capitec. It’s exciting for us. Being based in South Africa, being here in one of the most beautiful countries in the world, we’re super excited about what we are still going to achieve – and what we are going to be able to enable people to achieve, in the future.

The Finance Ghost: Absolutely. Manie, George, thank you so much for your time on this podcast and all the best to you both with the business. Very cool, what you’ve built, and I wish you both a lot of success, and to the teams on that side.

I’ll include in the show notes, the links to the websites, etc., so people can easily find you. And thank you! Manie, George – all the best.

Manie Van Greunen: Thanks to Capitec. Thanks for this awesome journey, for this awesome podcast. I believe what you’re doing is going to be very successful and value-adding to people out there. So thank you very much for your time, and effort, as well. 

George Van Greunen: Thanks to you and Capitec for making this podcast worthwhile.

The Finance Ghost: Lovely. Ciao, bye.

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