Negligible revenue impacts Famous Brands’ shares
FAMOUS Brands’ shares slid nearly 7 percent yesterday, after the group warned it had generated negligible revenue in the five weeks during the lockdown period across its different geographies, as Covid-19 hurt its operations.
In early trade it slid as low as R37.88 before closing at 39.50.
However, the group, which is Africa’s largest branded food service franchisor operates in South Africa, the rest of Africa, the Middle East (AME) and the UK, said in a trading update that it welcomed the recent measures to ease lockdown restrictions by the governments in its respective trading markets as it looked to start reopening some of its restaurants.
“The board and management fully endorse the various governments’ decisive actions to contain the spread and impact of the Covid-19 pandemic, and all of the group’s reopened operations will be managed responsibly and in compliance with Covid-19 risk-mitigating regulations,” the group said.
In South Africa Famous Brands said its restaurants would offer deliveryonly services after the country was placed on Level 4 of the lockdown last week.
“These services are confined to controlled trading hours between 9am and 7pm. The group’s leading brands will be the primary providers of this delivery-only service,” the group said.
Its leading brands include Steers, Debonairs Pizza and Fishaways, and the group said this also included to a much smaller extent, Wimpy and Mugg & Bean.
Famous Brands also planned to trial delivery service on its signature brands where possible, but with limited geographical coverage.
Their signature brands include Turn ’n Tender steakhouse, Mythos, Tashas, Salsa Mexican Grill and Lupa Osteria.
“While management is hopeful
Gourmet Burger Kitchen (GBK) had started reinstating limited delivery services in a few restaurants starting on April 29, to potentially form the basis of a slow and phased restart.
Last month, Famous Brands announced that it was reviewing its investment in GBK and had decided not to provide any further financial assistance to the business.
“Wimpy UK has successfully operated delivery and take-away services where practicable and in line with regulations since March 23,” the group said.
In the AME region Famous Brands’ restaurants in Angola, Botswana, Ethiopia, Kenya, Malawi, Mauritius, Mozambique, Namibia, Nigeria, UAE, Zambia and Zimbabwe continued to trade, but with limited services.
The group’s manufacturing and logistics operations had also been closed, except for Lamberts Bay Foods, which supplies potato products to the market, and a small component of direct sales to the retail market.
A SENIOR Amazon.com engineer has resigned in solidarity with fired corporate and warehouse workers who protested working conditions at the company.
Tim Bray, a vice-president and veteran engineer with the company’s cloud-computing division, said in a blog post that he quit “in dismay at Amazon firing whistleblowers who were making a noise about warehouse employees frightened of Covid-19.”
Bray, who worked in Vancouver, British Columbia, was a distinguished engineer, a coveted title large tech companies award to senior technologists. The decision will likely cost him more than $1 million in loss of salary and unvested Amazon stock.
Amazon has been fighting the spread of coronavirus cases in its logistics network and a public-relations battle against critics who say the company hasn’t done enough to make warehouses safe. Small groups of workers at facilities around the US have walked off the job in protest, and an employee activist group, Amazon Employees for Climate Justice, called for corporate employees to call in sick after two of its members were fired.
Amazon has said the workers were fired for violating corporate policy forbidding them from speaking publicly about internal matters.
Bray, who last year signed the employee group’s open letter urging Amazon to do more to fight climate change, said he raised concerns about the firings internally. Having done that, he said, “remaining an Amazon VP would have meant, in effect, signing off on actions I despised. So I resigned.”
He said he believed both that Amazon was making massive investments to keep workers safe during the pandemic, and that workers who have spoken out have legitimate concerns.
Bloomberg