by Ekrem Duman | Aug 26, 2026 | South Africa Company Stories, South Africa Retail & Consumer
⚡ TL;DRWoolworths built one of the world’s better private-label food retailers, serving affluent South Africans with quality and convenience at premium prices — and then spent a decade destroying value in clothing and in the acquisition of Australian...
by Ekrem Duman | Aug 26, 2026 | South Africa Company Stories, South Africa Retail & Consumer
⚡ TL;DRPick n Pay was South Africa’s retail pioneer under Raymond Ackerman, championing consumer sovereignty and challenging apartheid-era business norms, and then spent two decades losing ground to a competitor that invested in distribution while it did...
by Ekrem Duman | Aug 26, 2026 | South Africa Company Stories, South Africa Retail & Consumer
⚡ TL;DRShoprite grew from eight Cape Town supermarkets bought in 1979 into Africa’s largest food retailer by serving the customers other chains avoided — building the lowest cost structure in the market, owning its own distribution, and expanding...
by Ekrem Duman | Aug 26, 2026 | South Africa Company Stories, South Africa Insurance & Asset Management
⚡ TL;DRLiberty and Momentum represent the squeezed middle of South African insurance — large enough to matter, too small to compete with Sanlam and Old Mutual on scale or with Discovery on innovation. One solved it by being fully absorbed into Standard...
by Ekrem Duman | Aug 26, 2026 | South Africa Company Stories, South Africa Insurance & Asset Management
⚡ TL;DRSouth African asset management is unusually concentrated: the state-owned Public Investment Corporation manages the largest pool of savings on the continent, while a handful of private houses — Allan Gray, Coronation, Ninety One, PSG and others...
by Ekrem Duman | Aug 26, 2026 | South Africa Company Stories, South Africa Insurance & Asset Management
⚡ TL;DRDiscovery built an insurance model around rewarding healthy behaviour, proved that the resulting behaviour change reduces claims enough to fund the rewards, and then exported the intellectual property to insurers across twenty countries — turning a...
