Whitey on the budget, poor growth and Eskom

I think as far as the Shoprite people are concerned the budget was actually favourable — an increase in pensions, the social grant, etc, and the tax hikes won’t reach the average Shoprite [customer], so I’m not really too stressed about that.

I would have liked to see the minister give a bit of guidance as to what he’s going to do with the parastatals, crime and corruption. I think there’s a lot of scope for South Africa to grow if all the different ministries and parastatals actually get run . . . better.

What does stress me out with South Africa is I’m not sure that we can even get the 2% growth [the finance minister] projected there. What I’ve seen in the minister’s budget is a very well-prepared budget, very conservative, but . . . I stress, will jobs be created with this budget or not?

There’s nothing: the budget is good for Shoprite as it stands, I’m not worried about that. I have a problem with the long-term position of South Africa, vis-à-vis its neighbours in African countries. I think we shouldn’t be in a developed world, 2%-plus growth rate — we should be [in] the 4%, 4.5% plus range.

FOOD CHAIN FUNDI: CEO Whitey Basson we can do. We’ve got nearly R300million worth of generators, but they’re not designed to run for 24 hours a day. And what do I do with my farmers who cannot even [water] their crops? A lettuce needs water every day and it’s all pumped . . .

We can do very little except sell dry goods . . . and stuff that has been pre-produced, but your perishable areas of the business will go to the dogs within 48 hours.

I normally don’t deal in shares . . . I know the price of chickens, not the Shoprite shares, but you can expect that. The market is so far ahead of everybody . . . if you look at the Shoprite share price, that has moved like, R30, in three months from down, up, going down again . . . I think there’s just a helluva lot of forward-buying and stuff like that because really, by South African standards, the results are actually very good.

I think it will be a standout performer, but you must remember that in the past six months Nigeria has had Ebola, they’ve had the oil price coming off the $100 per barrel mark to $55 ... Then there’s Boko Haram shooting people and blowing it up but that’s not forever and a day.

There’ve been a lot of negatives but these hopefully are shortterm [issues], we really treat it as something we must cope with and learn how to deal with and carry on as normal.

We can trade through Nigeria easier than [we can] trade through South Africa: with a 4.5% growth rate and no competition, it’s much easier for Shoprite to make money [there] than in a 2% [growth] area where there’s a lot of competition.

The analysts are paid to make money for their clients, so they [take the share price] up and down — I’m not taking too much notice of that as an indication of what they think of the future.

South Africa is substantially overbuilt if you compare that with Africa. Your customers per shopping mall is way, way lower than anywhere else in Africa.