Windy city can get whiffy and investing timing can be iffy
You always know you are close to Port Elizabeth by the pong. When you cross the Swartkops River from the north, the offshore gale carries a whiff of mud and bad prawn. Enjoy it, because very soon the reek of organic rot will be overtaken by a peculiar eye-watering stench that could only come from the Algorax factory.
In the mid-1980s, I did not begrudge Algorax its vile mark on the world. It was a client, an integral part of the city, and I was a citizen.
When we weren’t fishing or watching cricket, we went to work. It seemed everybody had something to do with the car or construction industries. At our advertising agency, the clients made tyres (Firestone), batteries (Willard), shock absorbers (Armstrong) and sundry other bits in between. Paint, steel, wood, glass, plastic: the essence of life.
If you knew nothing about machinery and heavy industry, you learnt damn fast. For a bookish Witbank boy who used to gaze in envy as friends confidently mucked around with lathes and drills and welding machines, living in PE was like going to blue-collar high school.
We never asked the Algorax guys why they wanted to advertise the stuff they made, carbon black. Surely everyone who needed to know, knew.
They gave us a vial of carbon black to look at for inspiration. Mistake. The powder goes everywhere, it stinks, it stains, and you can’t brush it off if you spill it.
Turned out the client wasn’t interested in cleverness. So the ad ended up spelling out exactly why the rubber and plastic industries couldn’t work without the tough, binding grit of carbon black. Tyres would be soft, blobby, grey, useless without it. La-di-da, just the kind of fascinating info you needed if you wanted to charm a PE lassie over a beer.
To an outsider, the inhabitants of the city seemed to be united in not-unpleasant toil. It felt good to be a working part of the smelly, grimy business of doing proper work. High finance? No, none of that. The closest we got to high finance was getting a loan at the EP Building Society.
One of the factories in North End, the industrial area of PE, was owned by SA Druggists.
Despite its pretentious, highfalutin name, SA Druggists was a down-home operation best known for making Lennon pharmaceuticals. Some of these “remedies” were kind of funky, with a distinct flavour of the farmyard or bathtub.
We didn’t know it then, but that SA Druggists factory with the saw-toothed roof would by the turn of the millennium be a thriving part of a new PE company called Aspen. I wish I had been paying more attention: Aspen listed on the JSE in 1998 at R2.40 a share. I eventually caught up when I used some of my redundancy money to buy 114 Aspen shares for R50,000. The price on February 9 2015 was R433.56. I reckon that little PE company made a lot of people quite rich in 17 years.
Not me, of course. After buying at the extreme top of the market, and adding to the Aspen pot as the price fell, nothing good came. I sold 114 shares on June 6 2016 for R36,000. At R317. A good, solid, life-affirming R14,000 loss in just over a year.
You say I should have held on? Look, I don’t like your tone. I happened to hold on to some of them, all the way down to R65 in August 2019. Yup, the kind of swashbuckling investment you really want to tell your grandkids about.
At any rate, bugger Aspen, bugger PE. Some things you have to leave behind.