BizNews Radio

The energy department's recent announcement that it plans to deregulate the fuel price by imposing a price cap on 93 octane petrol could have a major unintended consequence. If the price of fuel exceeds the market cap, there is no incentive to import or produce product at a loss. In extreme situations this could lead to pumps running dry. In a broad-ranging interview, BizNews spoke to Justus van der Spuy and Enrico Ganter, executive directors at Capital Energy Resources, about market forces driving high oil prices, and what the state of South Africa's strategic petroleum reserve is. They also shed light on where Russia's crude is going as Europe looks to ween itself off that country's oil and gas in the wake of their invasion of Ukraine.

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Bronwyn Nielsen spoke to Thiago Almeida, Sector Lead Power and Infrastructure at Nedbank Corporate and Investment Banking, about the tendency to get caught up in the power generation story to the detriment of focusing on distribution and transmission. Almeida stated that while the continued focus on power generation is a significant challenge, especially in the race to decarbonise our energy matrix, he discussed the lack of attention currently being paid to transmission and distribution.

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For over a decade, Dr Frans Cronje was SA's party pooper. The former CEO of the IRR was perceived as an arch pessimist, a man guaranteed to prick bubbles of optimism before they could inflate. He regarded himself merely as a realist, sharing the harsh truth because anything else would have been dishonest. Cronje's prescience when the country has sliding into its darkest period adds considerable weight to the credibility of his forecast of a political transformation that is set to unleash SA's undeniable potential. In this fascinating podcast, Cronje explains to Alec Hogg of Biznews how he reached his phoenix rising conclusions. Shaped by deep polling of ANC voters, a bloc now busy divorcing itself from a party it regards as useless, incompetent and corrupt. The future, he predicts, will be governance by a German or Israeli-type coalition - a unique situation for a nation which for 400 years has been subjected to a dominant, often abusive ruler.

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Statistics charting the performance of South African learners in maths is staggering. In the 2019 Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study, they consistently scored in the bottom three countries over a range of tests. Fingers are being pointed at teachers in another study by the 2030 Reading Panel, indicating that newly graduated teachers from three universities scored an average weak 54% for a maths test meant for primary school pupils. The result is that less than 30% of matric students take maths, and only half of them pass their exams. But a Midrand parent, Thembaletu Mbangcolo, decided to do something about it and started tutoring his son and his success led to other parents entrusting their kids’ maths teaching to him. Mbangcolo told BizNews he researched methods to unblock the negativity to maths many students have, using Stanford Professor Jo Boaler’s method, called Mathematical Mindsets. He’d like to see South African education departments adopting its concepts. – Linda van Tilburg

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Good news from a weak Wall Street session with the share prices of tech giants Microsoft and Alphabet (aka Google) surging in the after-market despite both reporting lower numbers than analysts had expected. This suggests that after almost two weak years for equities, expectations may have over-shot on the downside. Stock markets look 18 months ahead, and investors appear to be looking past today's bad newsflow, that includes tonight's likely increase of another 0.75% in US interest rates to tame the highest inflation in 40-years. Also in this episode of the BizNews Breakfast Briefing - Solidarity Research Institute praises Monday's watershed announcement by president Cyril Ramaphosa on reforming SA's electricity sector, reckons it could even have been written by its own analysts. And from abroad, the IMF has sharply reduced its global economic growth forecasts for this year and next.

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As the list of uncertainties - including the Covid pandemic, war in Ukraine, volatile stock markets and locally, loadshedding and political uncertainty - keeps growing, investors are looking for ways to insulate their assets against uncertainty. But how do they go about achieving that? Riaan van der Vyver and Scott Picken from Wealth Migrate believe the answer lies in diversification into alternative assets. With their platform, they say, you can invest like the 1% - who don’t put their eggs in one basket - with a click of a button. Wealth Migrate is a digital marketplace providing vetted investment opportunities. Van der Vyver said due diligence was done on the opportunities, and an investor can invest in a range of alternative asset classes for as little as $100. – Linda van Tilburg

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Clem Sunter is in a league of his own. The former head of Anglo's Gold and Uranium Division (when it was the world's #1), the Oxford-educated futurist and prolific best-selling author is passionate about encouraging entrepreneurship. Particularly those resilient beings who overcome incredible odds by operating successfully in South African townships, a highly compeititve, under-researched and under-supported sector. Sunter has little time for State-imposed schemes that waste taxpayer money on favouring the creation of 'businesses' by the politically connected. Much better, he says, for government to recognise a veritable army of informal sector entrepreneurs building businesses and creating jobs where meritocracy rules. In this interview with Alec Hogg, Sunter lauds the insights of recent BizNews interviewee GG Alcock - suggesting his voice is the one should be heard above those of many empty vessels whom ignore the township economy and thus have little feel for what's really happening in South Africa.

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President Cyril Ramaphosa's announcement of sweeping reforms to stabilise the power grid and get the country quite literally out of the dark has been welcomed as a necessary and urgent step in the right direction. Connie Mulder, head of the Solidarity Research Institute (SRI) told BizNews the crux of the president's plan is to decentralise power generation - a policy shift that couldn't come soon enough. Mulder believes this change in tack follows immense pressure from political parties, civil society organisations and think tanks after almost 15 years of government inaction. Mulder says he's cautiously optimistic, but make no mistake, he said: "this has riled up a lot of vested interests. If South Africa does move outside of Eskom for generation there are a lot of cadres who are set to lose a lot of money and we should expect resistance to this from all sectors, especially your more left-leaning trade unions which will be up in arms completely." Many of the reforms announced by Ramaphosa mirror what Mulder suggested in a previous interview with BizNews which can be accessed here.

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Many South Africans flock to London, either in search of increasingly greener pastures for their professional careers or if younger for an intended two or three year stint before returning to SA. Many of those South Africans in the latter category, however, end up staying in England, particularly due to the rapidly decreasing stability in their homeland. BizNews founder Alec Hogg spoke to one such individual, Mark Perchtold, whose short stint turned into a whole new trajectory when he found himself in a really good job. Almost 18 years later, Perchtold is now a Director at Omba Advisory & Investments Ltd. In an informative interview, Perchtold explained how at Omba, “we're not passive managers, we're active managers, we express active views, but our tool set is the ETFs.”

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Share prices are reflecting investor nervousness ahead of the US Fed's big interest rate decision tomorrow - and Wall Street is also pre-occupied by the Big Tech quarterlies later this week when Amazon, Apple, Alphabet and Meta report. Numbers from Walmart delivered a shock with that stock dropping 10% in after-market trade, dragging Amazon 4% lower. To help the BizNews Breakfast Briefing more digestible, we've cut back to a single interview's highlights and today feature Leon Louw, president of the Free Market Foundation, who is in attack mode against the organisation he co-founded in 1975. Apart from previewing Big Tech quarterlies, our partners at the FT also disclose which cities are especially vulnerable to record high temperatures that have hit during the Northern Hemisphere summer.

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