Editor’s pick
South African phones took 17.47 billion unwanted calls in six months
Truecaller's half-year estimate is up 25.2% on last year, and the opt-out list meant to stop the calls is taking sign-ups but still has no start date.
Business Bagel News
Daily news from the Business Bagel desk — the markets, money and company stories shaping South Africa, reported fast and kept clear.
Editor’s pick
Big story
Shell has lost its Wild Coast exploration right, and the renewal route with it
The Constitutional Court set aside the right Shell and Impact Africa have held since 2014, holding that more than R1 billion already spent cannot outweigh how badly the law was broken in granting it.
Uber and Pony.ai are putting 2,000 driverless taxis into Europe and will not say where
Four new European cities on top of Zagreb, no names, no timeline, and a plan to extend the same partnership into the Middle East.
Truworths told the market its sales and earnings both fell, and the share rose 5%
Group retail sales for the year to 28 June slipped 0.9% to R21.8 billion, and the company says a consumer recovery that started in February was overtaken within days.
Edward Kieswetter left the tax office in April and by May was running his own company
The former SARS commissioner has founded vEKtor Solutions Laboratory, a firm he pitches against the traditional consultancies he says are becoming irrelevant.
SAA's third chief executive in four months started on Friday
The board put acting group CEO Matshela Seshibe on special leave with immediate effect, gave no reason beyond a governance statement, and handed the job to its chief legal officer.
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.
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.