Every set of annual results from a JSE-listed company carries a profit figure that exists nowhere else in the world. On Wednesday the exchange proposed making it shorter.
Headline earnings per share is South Africa's own tidied-up profit measure, and listed companies currently publish two versions: the ordinary one, and a diluted one that assumes every share option and convertible instrument turns into shares. The diluted version is the one being taken out.
Why the change is happening now
Not because the JSE went looking for it. IFRS 18, the new international accounting standard, is mandatory for reporting periods starting on or after 1 January 2027, and it bans per-share figures from annual financial statements unless they qualify as management performance measures. When SAICA rewrote its headline earnings circular to fit, it could not preserve the sections dealing with diluted headline earnings. “The JSE is therefore proposing removing this obligation from the JSE Listings Requirements,” the exchange's amendments paper says.
The main figure survives, but moves house. Headline earnings per share must still be published at the same time as the interim and annual statements; it simply sits outside the information the auditor signs an opinion on. A third change tidies the rulebook itself: the reconciliation between earnings and headline earnings, previously repeated throughout the requirements, now lives once, in the definitions. Comments close on 13 October, the same day as SAICA's.
All of it sits inside the Simplification Project, running since May 2022, which has cut the volume of the listings requirements by half as the exchange tries to slow the exits. Over five years 130 companies have dropped off the JSE, many of them citing what it costs to stay on.
The fight the JSE is having at the same time
While it trims rules for listed companies, the exchange is in court with grain farmers. Grain SA marched on its Sandton offices on 13 August, handed over a petition carrying 965 signatures, and launched an urgent interdict against a separate decision taken on 20 July: scrapping a two-season pilot of a multiple reference point model for soybean location differentials and reverting to a single reference point.
On 19 August, the same day as the earnings announcement, Grain SA said the JSE had decided to oppose that interdict, and put a number on what is in dispute. Average transport deductions run at about R113 a ton under the pilot model against about R333 under a single reference point, a gap of roughly R220 a ton, or about R696 million across the relevant volumes and silo points. The JSE has proposed moving the reference point from Randfontein to Driefontein from the marketing season starting 1 March 2027.
