Daily news from the Business Bagel desk — the markets, money and company stories shaping South Africa, reported fast and kept clear.
Refiant, built by a South African-led team, has released Protea — a family of AI models that can process up to 10 million tokens in a single prompt, dwarfing the memory of most mainstream chatbots.
Big story
Manufacturing production fell 4.3% in the year to May — its steepest drop in over a year — piling pressure on second-quarter growth just as the Reserve Bank weighs another rate hike.
Big story
First Abu Dhabi Bank, sitting on R6.6 trillion in assets, has won the right to register its name locally and told the court it plans to apply for a South African banking licence.
Editor’s pick
SAHPRA has ordered an urgent, top-tier recall of every weight-loss injection made by iDexis, and warned the doctors who keep prescribing them.
The Johann Rupert–linked investment company banked about R62bn selling its UK insurance stake, and a family-linked adviser pocketed a R2.3bn performance fee for the year.
A US judge reluctantly approved a $1.5m settlement between Elon Musk and the securities regulator over a late Twitter-stake disclosure that saved him some $150m.
South Africa's freight rail operator has hauled its bulk-commodity volumes back to pre-Covid levels, even as containers stay stuck.
Big story
Pick n Pay plans to hand CEO Sean Summers a fresh batch of shares in August to replace the ones he forfeited when the turnaround slipped, and the way the targets are written, he could still be paid out even if the supermarket business is losing money in 2029.
Editor’s pick
As platinum shares slump and most investors head for the exit, BlackRock has raised its stake in miner Northam Platinum to just over 5%, a contrarian bet that the metal is due a comeback.
Allan Gray has started buying beaten-down Indonesian shares, beginning with an instant-noodle giant, betting that this year's brutal selloff has left real bargains on the table.
Samsung Electronics says its quarterly profit leapt roughly 19-fold to about 89.4 trillion won, likely the biggest three-month haul any tech company has ever posted, yet investors still sold.
Hyprop, the JSE-listed landlord behind malls like Canal Walk and Somerset Mall, set out to raise about R500m by selling new shares and closed with roughly R739m after demand ran hot.