MTN Nigeria has been successful in its bid for one of the two 100MHZ spectrum licences in the 3.5GHz spectrum band auctioned by the Nigerian Communications Commission. This will enable the rollout of 5G services to MTN Nigeria's customers. It's been a huge year for the yellow telecoms giant, with the partial sell-down of the stake in Nigeria in its final stages.
Karooooo, a favourite of mine, released an update confirming that it achieved 1,470,385 total subscribers by the end of November. That's an 18% increase over the past 12 months. As one would expect, the rate of growth is also much faster than in 2020, with net subscriber additions of 164,352 in the nine-month period vs. 119,574 in the corresponding period last year. The third quarter results will be released on January 18th.
Adcock Ingram seems to b e recovering along with the hospital groups, which makes sense as the group primarily depends on selling cold and flu medicine to consumers and products to hospitals for various procedures. An environment of lockdowns didn't do the company any favours, as there was no cold season last year (ironically) and elective surgeries were postponed. In the six months ending December, the group expects earnings to be at least 20% higher than in the corresponding period.
Director dealings (transactions in shares of listed companies by directors of those companies or their associates) are common on the JSE and I don't bore you by commenting on each one.
However, yesterday there was a dealings announcement that caught my eye. Italtile CEO-designate Lance Foxcroft will take over from Jan Potgieter on 1 January 2022. He's put nearly R4.8 million of his own wealth behind the company by buying Italtile shares, as confirmed by a SENS announceme nt yesterday.
Another director worth commenting on is Mark Barnes, who is selling shares in Purple Group faster than you can say "Easy Equities" - just this week, he sold R5 million in shares and transferred another R4.4 million in settlement of loan accounts.
Eastern Platinum has been ramping up production at its small-scale platinum group metals (PGM) operations. The big push in 2022 will be to raise funds to restart underground operations at the Crocodile River Mine, for which a technical report is being finalised.
Telkom CEO Sipho Maseko will step down from the role on 31 December 2021 and will stick around until June next year to help CEO-designate Serame Taukobeng settle into his new office.
If you haven't heard it yet, episode 55 of
Magic Markets is packed with insights into the highly topical supply chain industry. Andries Retief (a South African ex pat) is the CEO of Central and Eastern Europe for DHL. He's an expert in this industry and a wonderful mind to learn from in the podcast.
Listen to it here.
Good luck in the markets today and enjoy the public holiday! We will be back on Friday.
The Finance Ghost
