If, by some chance, the heads of all SA’s retailers were to find themselves lined up on sun loungers with balmy waters lapping around their collective ankles over the festive season, there might be stern words directed at the Dis-Chem team for breaking omertà.
It’s a bit like a cricket match in which all the batsmen are scratching around muttering, "bloody awful pitch", "greentop", "turning square" and the like — except the one who is dispatching the ball over the pavilion with regularity and without breaking a sweat.
While it’s hard not to sympathise with those whose best-laid business plans are falling victim to the lack of loose change in the consumer’s pocket, Dis-Chem is just getting on with what it does extremely well.
While this can partly be attributed to the general resilience of the pharma market — there’s a lot your great-uncle will give up before he skimps on the prescription meds, let alone the incontinence pants — there’s no doubt that it is remarkable to serve up the growth numbers that Dis-Chem has produced in this market.
Like-for-like turnover is up 8.6%, 19 new stores have been opened, and margins have improved as increased market share meant the group could negotiate better trade terms with suppliers. Its distribution arm now has the wholesale space it needs to serve the group’s growth in the medium term, and it is looking to grow market share by increasing supply to franchisees and independent pharmacies.
It’s a remarkably sure-footed performance from a quality operator that should continue to confound the tepid consumer environment.
Hanging up on luxury handsets
Alas and alack, Vertu is no more. Founded by Nokia in 2002, the manufacturer of handmade, luxury mobile phones was designed to attract those true believers in the power of the consumer-led economic recovery — those for whom paying a small fortune for an iPhone X was just not enough.
Before its demise, Vertu managed to flog 500,000 phones, ranging from a standard stainless steel and titanium model to a jewel-encrusted Boucheron extravaganza that was yours for a cheeky £1m.
The top end of the luxury goods market has proved remarkably strong as the really rich get ever richer, but Vertu found itself caught between two stools. Too bling by a factor for the average civilian, and yet by many reports insufficiently ostentatious to attract the eye of the gold Lamborghini market, sales started to wobble after Nokia sold the company in 2012. Then the Chinese government pulled the plug on the party of "business gift-giving" — spelt B-R-I-B-E-S — and the company wobbled through a couple of owners until it collapsed into liquidation in July in circumstances that have now got the lawyers drooling.
Perhaps the real problem was that luxury goods need a decent shelf-life — Swiss watchmaker Patek Philippe’s iconic advertising campaign tells you, for example, that "You never actually own a Patek Philippe. You merely look after it for the next generation."
This is always going to be a hard sell to replicate in a niche where technology is moving so rapidly that a phone looks like a museum piece five years after it was state of the art — and it proved too much for Vertu.