South Africa's factories shrank again in June, and the economy may feel it
Manufacturing output fell 1.7% in June, a softer patch than May but still a decline that is likely to drag on second-quarter growth.
Christian Maidman
The Roundup — Friday, 14 August 2026
Claude is about to hide a watermark in everything it writes, and some users are furious
Anthropic is embedding an invisible, machine-readable mark in Claude's text to meet a new European law, and it travels with your words when you copy and paste.
The rand just hit a five-month high, and South Africa barely earned it
A soft US inflation reading knocked the dollar and pushed the rand to its strongest since March, pulling R23.1 billion of foreign money into local bonds in a week.
Big story
Shoprite's Sixty60 is becoming a business big enough to list on its own
Checkers Sixty60 sold R25.5 billion of groceries last year, growing nearly five times faster than Shoprite's supermarkets, and this week it gave its AI assistant a voice.
The company behind PayJustNow skipped its dividend as bad debts piled up
Weaver Fintech grew revenue 10% to R2.8 billion, but a 62% jump in bad-debt costs and a debit-order glitch pushed earnings lower and the payout to zero.
Foschini's owner spent a billion rand buying its own shares. It has lost about half
TFG borrowed more than R1 billion for the first buyback in its history at nearly R106 a share; ten months on, the stock trades near R55.
Standard Bank just had its best six months ever, and shareholders are getting paid
Africa's biggest bank grew profit to a record R26.1 billion and lifted its dividend 10%, as fewer bad loans and busier trading desks did the heavy lifting.
Gold's record run hands Gold Fields a bumper first half
Higher output and a record gold price are set to push Gold Fields' half-year earnings up as much as 90%, with free cash flow more than doubling.
Platinum's turn: Northam's earnings jump nearly eightfold, and it lifts the dividend floor
A 57% surge in the rand PGM price drove record revenue, profit and earnings, and Northam is now returning more cash to shareholders.
The Roundup — Thursday, 13 August 2026
MTN just posted its best African run in years, so why did R22.55bn vanish?
A single writedown on MTN's stranded Iran stake dragged reported profit down and knocked the share nearly 6%, even as its core markets boomed.