Filed under: Local News
Credit sales at the JD Group fell sharply, as expected, but consumer arrears fell only marginally at the company that owns national retail chains such as Morkels and Incredible Connection.
Filed under: Retail
Fashion retailer Truworths has bucked the declining clothing sales trend, squeezing out real growth in volume sales and lifting its share price nearly 6 percent on Friday.
Filed under: Local Company News
African Bank Investments Limited (Abil) would use the acquisition of furniture retailer Ellerine as a springboard into the rest of southern Africa, a market it had shunned in the past, Abil chief executive Leon Kirkinis confirmed yesterday.
Filed under: Local News
Retail confidence fell sharply to a three-and-a-half-year low in the fourth quarter of the year as spending slowed on higher interest rates, a new survey showed yesterday.
Filed under: Retail
Filed under: Trends
The ResearchBrief for today is forward looking from newspaper executives who identify the current trends they believe will have an impact on the future of businesses.
The list of 66 trends provided by eight newspaper executives will serve as the centrepiece for a “scenario planning” workshop, to be held in January, and published by the WAN Shaping the Future of the Newspaper project.
Some are profound and others are seemingly minor – but all have the potential to shape the future of newspapers. These are a few of the identified trends:
• Infotainment, with games, DVDs, tickets, samples and other non-traditional products becoming an increasingly important component of the media offering.
• Changing demographics, with more single households, older people and non-traditional families.
• Growing choice, with an infinite number of options making it hard to decide what products and services to buy.
• User-generated content that provides opportunities for self-expression and social interaction.
• Consumer power, where the customer is taking control over brands and information flows on the internet.
• Mobile devices becoming faster, smaller and user-friendly.
• The growing importance of social networks.
• Multi-channel strategies and the diminishing differences between types of news media.
Martha Stone, Director of the SFN project, said “The trends will be used as the catalyst for the scenario planning process, and… describe current trends that are likely to have a certain degree of importance in the future… We will focus on the most important trends and uncertainties and use them to build possible scenarios for the future.”
Filed under: Retail
Filed under: Retail
Filed under: Local News
January 15, 2008
By Tom Robbins
Cape Town – Sales growth at Massmart’s home improvement division had outperformed its other retail units, despite signs that high interest rates were starting to bite into the home renovation market, the firm said yesterday.
Filed under: Retail
Shoprite, South Africa’s second-largest retailer by sales, reported double-digit sales growth yesterday, confirming that food mass-market retailers were the only consumer sector to escape the downturn relatively unscathed.
January 17, 2008
By Tom Robbins
Cape Town – Shoprite, South Africa’s second-largest retailer by sales, reported double-digit sales growth yesterday, confirming that food mass-market retailers were the only consumer sector to escape the downturn relatively unscathed.
Sales last month at stores open longer than a year were 11.7 percent higher compared with the previous festive season, despite higher fuel costs that hit its core customers.
Half-year sales to December were up by 16.5 percent, but the company warned that a strike in the previous period at its biggest chain, Shoprite, gave an artificially positive view of the sales trend over this longer period. Sales including new stores were up 21.8 percent to R23.3 billion.
Rival Massmart reported last week that sales at its Masscash food wholesale division were also relatively good, up 15.4 percent over a similar period.
Statistics SA said yesterday that November sales at speciality food stores, which included delis and bakeries, were flat compared with a year ago, suggesting that higher market segment consumers were buying down.
Quinton Ivan, a portfolio manager at Coronation Fund Managers, said Shoprite had a “very strong” performance last month, considering the tough retail climate.
Ivan agreed that the December comparative figure was the most accurate reflection of sales performance, as the strike had ended before December in the previous period.
He noted that the strike had hit the company’s biggest chain, the Shoprite supermarkets.
Shoprite did not reveal food inflation, following steep rises in food commodities, but Ivan said he expected inflation had been in the high single digits for the half-year.
But Abri du Plessis, chief investment officer at Gryphon Asset Management, said it was hard to know to what extent the slower sales growth from December was due to the strike or to a slowdown in consumer spending.
He said unusual pre-Christmas clothing sales at both Woolworths and the Edgars chains suggested festive season sales had been relatively poor, despite the fact that consumers had probably spent beyond their means.
Shoprite shares fell 4.4 percent yesterday at R37.40, tracking the sector’s 4 percent loss.
