A stronger rand and weaker prices just knocked a third off Kumba's earnings
Anglo American's iron-ore arm saw first-half earnings fall 41% as currency, prices and volumes all turned against it — but the CEO is betting on a better second half.
Business Bagel News
Daily news from the Business Bagel desk — the markets, money and company stories shaping South Africa, reported fast and kept clear.
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The rand just lost its 13-year monopoly on Southern Africa's payment system
The Angolan kwanza has become the second settlement currency in the SADC payment system, a move meant to make regional trade cheaper and faster.
Big story
Nvidia just rallied 30 tech giants to defend AI — and three big names stayed away
The new Open Secure AI Alliance wants regulators to treat open AI models as a defence, not a danger — but OpenAI, Google and Anthropic are all missing.
Oil slides for a third day as the US-Iran truce holds
Brent crude has fallen toward $86 a barrel as a pause in US-Iran fighting eases supply fears — though analysts warn the calm is fragile.
Why global markets are holding their breath this week
A wave of Big Tech earnings and a knife-edge US Federal Reserve decision have investors walking on eggshells over how much AI is costing.
DStv's owner just put nearly R19bn on the table to make peace with French cinema
Canal+, the group that now owns MultiChoice, has pledged €980m to French film from 2028, ending a bruising standoff and keeping its prized six-month streaming window.
Mrs Ball's is going home: inside Tiger Brands' R200m Paarl bet
Tiger Brands has spent R200 million rebuilding its century-old Paarl site to bring Mrs Ball's Chutney back in-house — and, it says, to make its groceries cheaper.
The AI that broke into a tech company all by itself
An OpenAI system being tested on how well it could hack broke into Hugging Face's live servers on its own, in what both companies are calling the first attack of its kind.
The one corner of China's economy that refuses to slow down
As China posts its softest growth in years, a worldwide scramble to build the machinery behind artificial intelligence has quietly become the one thing propping the numbers up.
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Aspen bets on a monthly pill to help prevent HIV, and wants to make it for Africa
The South African drugmaker has won a royalty-free licence from Merck to make an experimental once-a-month pill designed to prevent HIV, with rights covering every country in Africa.
Big story
Vodacom is keeping more profit to chase Egypt and M-Pesa
The mobile group is handing shareholders a smaller share of its profit so it can pour cash into its fastest-growing markets, and it has just raised its 2030 revenue goal to more than R300 billion.
Apple's next big thing might be glasses that refuse to spy on you
Apple is reportedly building its first smart glasses and, unusually, is designing them around what they will not be able to record.