Is African Bank ready to fly yet?
- South Africa
-
African Bank, African Rainbow Capital, Capital adequacy ratio, Capitec, FinBond, Grindrod Bank, Impairment, Net interest income, Non-interest revenue, Return on equity, Tyme Bank
- October 7, 2020
Remember African Bank? If you watched any of President Ramaphosa’s lockdown speeches, you were definitely given a refresher. We don’t know what they paid for those ads, but it was probably the most valuable advertising space anywhere in South Africa at the time. Long before that, African Bank had been on an aggressive campaign, advertising at airports and all over …
View Post
ARC investors vote with their cash
I have been openly critical of the way the African Rainbow Capital Investments (ARC) story has played out. Without rehashing what I’ve previously written, I thought I should touch on the news that ARC’s capital raise has been less than ideal. To be clear: they’ve raised the full R750m they wanted. The problem is that shareholders didn’t give them as much …
View Post
International firms circling South African companies
The Companies Act requires public companies to make an announcement whenever a shareholder crosses through a 5% milestone. In other words, if a shareholder held 4,8% and bought more shares today, thereby increasing to a shareholding in the company of 5,4%, the company would need to announce on SENS that this has happened. This is important because it alerts the …
View Post
Sasol – where to from here?
I decided it was time to take another look at Sasol and share my views on how I’m thinking about this going forward. As regular readers will know, I took a sizable punt at Sasol in April. It was a rollercoaster ride initially, but the share price has unfortunately settled into a downward trend as equities markets have cooled off …
View Post
Metair, but not met dividend
There’s a lot going on at Metair, ranging from a cancelled dividend through to fascinating potential corporate actions. It’s worth spending some time learning about this company that supplies a range of automotive components through companies in South Africa and Eastern Europe. the_ad id=”3223″ Declare. Defer. Defer again. Defend. Back in March, Metair announced a gross dividend of 120 cents …
View Post
Stats SA: Avoiding the word retrenchment
The headlines today were dominated by the long-awaited release by Stats SA of unemployment data for the second quarter. Lockdown only affected 10 days or so of Q1, but the true impact was felt from April to June. This Q2 data should’ve finally painted a picture of what really happened. Except, it didn’t. Much like the GDP data for Q2, …
View Post
Not all tech companies are created equal
You know by now that the lockdown period was great for many tech companies. Although “tech” is used as an umbrella term all the time, it’s something of a misnomer to do so. The companies that did well typically offer consumer apps or enterprise cloud solutions. Some software companies also did well and there were of course outliers like video …
View Post
Not all tech companies are created equal
You know by now that the lockdown period was great for many tech companies. Although “tech” is used as an umbrella term all the time, it’s something of a misnomer to do so. The companies that did well typically offer consumer apps or enterprise cloud solutions. Some software companies also did well and there were of course outliers like video …
View Post
The megatrends: investing in education
Imagine you held one of the first iPhones in your hands in 2007. With incredible insight into the future, you concluded that the smartphone would take over the world. Bravely backing your view, you decided to invest a sizable amount in this megatrend. If you had chosen Apple, you would be wealthy today. If you had chosen BlackBerry, you would …
View Post
A game of billions
In the world of corporate and public finances, numbers can quickly lose meaning. You probably think carefully about spending R500, but I’ll bet you often read about a number like R5bn without a moment’s thought given to the size of this number. Let’s take a moment to explain how enormous this number actually is. the_ad id=”3223″ Written out in full, …
View Post