Classic Business

Makwe Masilela, CIO of Makwe Fund Managers & Nick Kunze, portfolio manager at Sanlam Private Wealth

In this weekly feature Michael Avery gets up close and personal with South Africa’s business and political economy leaders, to uncover what makes them tick, keeps them up at night and keeps them going through the Covid storm. This week’s guest has gone from a small town, Outshoorn, to running the country’s most successful poultry outfit, surviving several heart attacks along the way an Astral Foods CEO Chris Schutte. His early life was marked by a love of sports (performing exceptionally well in both rugby and boxing) and strong friendships, attributes that have remained throughout his adult life. Not inspired by academic pursuits, Chris completed his schooling by attaining the barest minimum required marks while in his spare time experiencing the world of labour and business by working in a variety of part-time jobs, even sometimes more than one job on one day, from the early age of 14 years. These jobs included feather duster maker, grape harvester, ostrich farm guide and clothing salesman. Avery finds out more about a remarkable career in this broad ranging interview

Warwick Lucas, CIO of Galileo Asset Management & Prof Raymond Parsons, from School of Business and Governance at North West University

Independent economist Dr Roelof Botha

CEO Alan Pullinger

John Fox, sales director Enviromall

Moray Hathorn, partner at Webber Wentzel

James Edwards, CEO of PerformDM

The Brandfather Jeremy Sampson MD of Brand Finance Africa analyses the Clicks ad mistake – a bad hair day for the brand but he worries more about the sort of precedent that violence and anarchy have extracted from clicks….

The cost of no damage control for a global brand’s mistake.

Pharmaceutical company Aspen, grew itself from a home in Greyville, without inheritance or big investors in the beginning, to aspirations of becoming a multinational pharmaceutical giant until it hit hard times last year. It saw its annual headline profit increase by 9%, with group revenue rising to R38.6 billion. Revenue from its manufacturing unit increased by 22%. Its profitability received a boost from lower financing costs, as its net borrowings declined by R3.8 billion. These results reflect a robust performance in difficult circumstances with COVID-19 clearly having different impacts on different parts of the business. While COVID-19 has supported spikes in demand for certain medications in certain geographies (e.g. anesthetics in Europe) this has been partially offset by a subsequent period of de-stocking, reduced demand from delayed elective procedures, as well as lockdown in China. Aspen’s improving financial health comes a year after it was thrown into turmoil when investors dumped its shares on worries that it might not be able to shoulder its R54bn debt load, racked up in a series of acquisitions to diversify its portfolio from being mainly generics to specialist therapies including blood-clot and anaesthetics medicines. CEO Stephen Saad has set about slowly dismantling the business selling the gems (wide moat divisions in infant milk and thrombosis) to pay down the debt. Avery chats to Saad about what he’s done to reshape the business and how investors should think about the Aspen investment case from hereon.