Mention the word ‘Steinhoff’ and most of us think of former CEO Markus Jooste. The company’s former CFO isn’t without wrongdoing, either.
Naspers, which owns large stakes in South African companies like Media24, MultiChoice, and Takealot, has long been popular with those who dabble on the JSE.
Many of the country’s wealthiest citizens watched their net worths soar over the past 12 months, despite the economic havoc caused by the COVID-19 pandemic.
Cape Town’s own stock exchange. WhatsApp’s massive fine. NZ supermarket attack. Alan Turing the gambler. German heist arrests. Em Rata’s runway return.
Wealth can be measured in a number of ways, one of which is by how much stock value you hold on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange, or JSE.
The CEOs of big companies, even those who have had to take a bit of a pay cut, are still raking in extremely high salaries.
Whilst some companies have seen their stock rise over the last (almost) five months, others have taken knocks that will be felt for many years to come.
Experts agree that the poor state of the JSE can be traced back to China and America’s trade war, with August looking like a particularly bad month.
In the past week alone, 45 out of the 164 companies listed fell to their lowest levels in a year. Where some see disaster, others see opportunity.
In the midst of South Africa’s weakest economic environment in a decade, one publicly-listed company has seen consistently stellar results.
Slowly but surely, we are leaving the dumpster fire that was 2018 behind. For some of South Africa’s best-known companies, though, the woes have followed them.