DIGGING DEEP
By Matthew Hill
Fortune hunters have been scouring seabeds for years. Now two of the biggest names in mining are joining the search, but not for jewels in treasure chests. De Beers has long been bringing diamonds up from the depths but now, together wit...

KEEN TO FEED THE DRAGON
By Matthew Hill
China's steel mills are ravenous for iron ore. Not even the global recession has stopped them from consuming more this year. And Kumba Iron Ore (KIO), Africa's biggest producer, is keen to feed the dragon. According to KIO projects ...

SUNNY SIDE UP
By Matthew Hill
Any visitor to the Northern Cape would know why it has towns with names like Hotazel. The sun blazes brighter there. And Kumba Iron Ore, which has operations at Sishen and Postmasburg, is considering harnessing its energy to produce powe...

IN FOR THE LONG HAUL:
By Matebello Motloung
With an extended offshore revolving credit facility that's now doubled, Naspers's continuing treasure hunt for media assets around the globe is about to become even more interesting. Africa's biggest media group has extended its overdraft facility...

THROWING IN THE TOWEL?
By Stephen Cranston
The financial institutions are only prepared to go on funding the Charter Council until the end of December, according to Leon Campher, CE of the Association for Savings & Investment SA (Asisa). The Charter Council was set up to overse...

SIBLINGS TO COMPETE
By Sasha Planting
Adcock Ingram CEO Jonathan Louw doesn't say it in so many words, but the decision that was taken to unbundle Adcock from Tiger Brands without its iconic consumer brands, like Ingram's Camphor Cream, irks him. But a year later Adcock...

AS VOLATILE AS THE WEATHER
By Sasha Planting
Omnia MD Rod Humphris loves to ride roller coasters. "They can be fun, I don't think you grow out of them," he says. That's a good thing because earnings at the chemical company are as cyclical as ever. Reporting earlier this week ...

JOSTLING FOR MARKET SHARE
By Larry Claasen
The problem with Telkom lies not in what it says, but in what it has not said. Analysts are grumbling that at its recent results presentation the company did not provide much clarity about how it would replace the income it lost in...

ADJUSTMENTS CAN BE MADE
By Stephen Cranston
It is not often that a ruling by the pension funds adjudicator (PFA) makes its way to the supreme court of appeal. But the judg ment on Mungal vs Old Mutual, one of the landmark cases of Vuyani Ngalwana's time as the adjudicator, was h...

TOO MANY NUMBERS
By Larry Claasen
Was Queensgate Hotels & Leisure expecting to make a profit or a loss? Reading its trading statements, it's hard to tell. The AltX-listed hotel group put out a statement in September, saying it expected earnings per share (EPS) to be...

CRISIS WATCH
By Andrew McNulty
Does SA still have a manufacturing sector? A lot has been said this year about de-industrialisation and the collapse of local manufacturing. The strong rand, weak export demand, declining competitiveness and domestic recession are bla...

THE UGLY DUCKLING
By Larry Claasen
FOSCHINI 1. Cash positive 2. Revenue up 3. Share ignored 4. Dividend paid 5. Profitable ...

DIAMONDS & DOGS
Jamie Carr's picks of the week
Diamond - Naspers For those who are sensible enough to construct their portfolio to reflect their fantasy cricket team, Naspers has to be in there to represent Jacques Kallis. It's big, it's old, it's hugely dependable, and exactly what you ...

INVESTOR'S NOTEBOOK
By Stephen Cranston
Just as there are fads about sectors, there are fads about places. There are admirers of China today and there were admirers of East Germany in the 1970s and 1980s, which allegedly had a per capita income ahead of the UK's and approac...

LARGE CAPS FIT

Large-cap shares on the JSE have underperformed the mid-cap index b y around 15% over the past year. That trend has changed recently, however, with the relative graph of the JSE top 40 index having broken out of the relative falling w...