You're listening to Strictly Business Podcast with Lindsay Williams. The JSC is closed at stores for another day, so it's time for the 5 o'clock shadow. And as always on a Thursday, I speak to Viv Govender from Randsuisse in Johannesburg and David Shapiro from Sassvin Securities, also in the City of Gold. Now I've got a, I'll start with you actually, Viv, I've got a quiz for you. And who said this comment? Now, it's either the president.
of the united states the 47th president of the united states or lindsey williams that's me or david shapiro south africa's favorite south africa's favorite stockbroker now this is it who who said this uh where are we now i'm just trying to find the quote now um oh goodness me what am i doing here now i've lost it here at 10 34 this morning so i'll edit all this out um because Gosh, gentlemen, found it nearly because it's such a long, it's such a long. Let me start this again.
Sorry, I'll do the intro again because I've lost the quote from, you know, at 10. It was at 10.34 this morning. Donald Trump was in the Oval Office. Because millions of people, Donald Trump does what he always does. The outcome slips. Oh, God. Okay, I've got it. Finally. Excuse me. As everyone knows, that's it. I'll do it all again. Okay, three, two, one.
The JC has closed its doors for another day, so it's time for the 5 o'clock shadow with Viv Govender from Ranswiss and David Shapiro from Sasfin Securities. Now, Viv, I'll start with you because I've got a quiz for you. Who said this? The 47th President of the United States, that's the first answer, Lindsay Williams, as you know me, talking, or David Shapiro from Sasfin Securities. The quote is as follows. As everyone knows, I am an extraordinarily brilliant person. That's it.
As everyone knows, I am an extraordinarily brilliant person. Obviously, Viv, it's a rhetorical question. It was truly David. Of course. I feel a little bit slighted there, by the way, Viv. But this is the man in charge of the nuclear buttons, Viv. I don't want to go on about this because I tend to get a bit obsessed by this sort of thing. But he sent this out at 10.34. And it's the most absurd, childish, ridiculous thing I've ever heard in my life. I am this brilliant person. What's going on?
Aren't you scared, Viv? Look, I mean, there is the idea that he's playing 7D chess or something maybe because he acts crazy and everyone is scared of him. That's one possibility. But I would have to say with regards to Trump at the moment, this is something that we've discussed in the office. If there's a statement coming out and one comes from the Iranians and one comes from President Trump, I will trust the Iranians 10 times out of 10 versus what Trump says.
Trump's declarations on Truth Central or whatever it's called there literally have nothing predictive involved with them. If he says he will not do a deal, if he says he will not extend a ceasefire, if he says, you know, we are going to blow bridges and power plants up tonight, they literally have nothing to do with how the world is going to be changed in the future. So you can almost ignore them.
You know, you can't determine anything about the actions of the U.S., about the current state of negotiations. It's just meaningless. On the other hand, when the Iranians do talk, they tend to have been, you know, speaking the truth, you know, weirdly enough. And we live in a weird world right now where literally the Iranian government is more trustworthy in terms of what they say to the President of the United States. Can you imagine that? Yes, I heard that comment as well.
Isn't it a strange world where you have to believe the Ayatollah rather than the President? David, over to you on this one because I can see your shoulders sagging here. You know, I just think he's in deep trouble. I think Trump is just lashing out all over the place. Everything's falling around him. Even Tucker Carlson has now withdrawn his support, said he has remorse about backing him in 2024.
Yes, I know Tucker Carlson is not the kind of person that you want to associate with, but I mean, that's what's happening to the right of his party. To the left, it's even worse. I think that he's just imploding. He doesn't know what to do. He's got no answers. And, you know, even around his small, the small circle of people around him, I think, are in a similar kind of position. Nobody's got a solution. And, you know, the Iranians are just looking at him.
Do you remember that cut from, what's the name, from Monty Python, the Holy Grail? When King Arthur's riding through and he comes across a castle and it's the French, you know, and they start throwing down insults at him and throwing down all kinds of things, cows and chickens and everything. Basically, that reminds me of Trump at the moment. He's just facing this castle where people are just insulting him and belittling him and, you know, just confusing him.
I'm I'm I'm genuinely worried and I'm not sure he's going to last I'm not sure he's going to get through the next few months but this is what I want to this is this is the phrase I wanted from one of you two or from anyone that I've spoken to I'm genuinely worried and that's what you said because I am genuinely worried because I don't know where what will happen because with him in charge it's disastrous and potentially dangerous without him in charge you
it's disastrous and potentially dangerous. If you get someone like Hegseth, not Hegseth, J.D. Vance getting in, and he's got Miller in charge as well with him, et cetera, and it goes on and on. And Viv's is sitting there looking at his spreadsheets and analyses of AI, and that's brilliant. And, David, you're the same. But on the other hand, we've got to think about our children. grandchildren and everything else because something is going on, Viv. Look, I don't think J.D.
Vance is the same kind of chaotic force that Trump is. I don't think Vance would do these kind of things. He did serve in the military, Vance. I don't think he's a combat soldier, but he was a military person. And I don't think anyone else, with the exception maybe of Pete Hegsett, might be or Stephen Muller might be this crazy, but they're not in the line of succession here. So it would be Vance if Trump was removed.
But one thing I want to point out, an interesting fact, is that It's coming to very unpopular Trump and it's actually hurting him in ways that are already affecting him. For instance, there was an election in Virginia, you know, just I think yesterday, where he lost. And what that does is effectively means that Virginia becomes, I think, like almost an even split between Republicans and Democrats, becomes like 11 or 10 to 1, it's called Democrats versus Republicans for the next election.
And this kind of move basically right now where... States are going off and redistricting basically based on responses to what Trump did in Texas, right? So Trump basically pushed Texas to redistrict and become much more Republican. It's prompted the Democrats to go against him. And it just so happens that while they're doing all these elections and all this maneuvering, they are actually doing it while Trump is, I think, underwater two to one in terms of favorability.
So it's actually pushing through. Did you see his response? It's horrific, of course. Did you see the response to this? All of a sudden, right at the last minute, the Democrats come and unload ballots, boxes of ballots. The same kind of response. This is exactly what he said on Truth Social, and I'll read it to you now. He said, a rigged election took place last night in the great Commonwealth of Virginia. All day long, Republicans were winning.
The spirit was unbelievable until the very end when, of course, there was a massive... Mail-in ballot drop. Where have I heard that before? And the Democrats eked out another crooked victory. What he's doing there, gentlemen, is setting the scene for the November elections. And it's very, very scary. That's why I'm scared. I don't have grandchildren yet, but my children I'm scared for. I'm scared for myself, for goodness sake. Something's going to go on here.
He'll be in his third term, I would imagine. That's what he's going for. David, carry on with that. Sorry. Yeah, no, I'm saying these are the reactions of a man who is cornered. who just doesn't know what to do. You know, he's run out of that kind of charm. When I say charm, people were, okay, he's funny, you know, he's clever, he's doing things that no other president would do. But all of a sudden he said, okay, you know. It's not funny. This is enough already. This is not funny anymore.
And I don't think he's funny anymore. The kind of remarks that he makes, his actions, his body language, somewhere along the line, you want him to grow up and to become presidential. And. he's just going worse. That's why I say I'm really worried about what comes next. And America is losing it. It's losing. It's got, you know, it's French people are just beginning to despise them. You know, he's got no one that he can turn to. The whole world is against him. His whole country is against him.
And if you think I'm exaggerating, I don't think so. I think this is genuinely the case. It genuinely is. And Viv, I was speaking to a friend of mine a couple of nights ago. I haven't spoken to her for years. She's 62 years old, incredibly successful in the interior design business in New York. She's lived for 30 years in the same flat in Midtown in Manhattan. David, you'll know the Midtown area. It's not exactly poor.
She's incredibly successful, Viv. And. I said to her, well, what are you going to do with the rest of your life? She said, well, I'm going to retire quite soon. I said, oh, really? Were you going to stay in Manhattan or go to Texas, you know, your home stage? She said, no, I couldn't breathe the same air as Trump anymore or the same air as I can't breathe the same air as Texans as well that vote for this man. She's moving to southwest London. She's got a house in Putney, southwest London.
And she's going to move there in the next year. And I said, but won't you miss it? You're a quintessential American success story. She said, no, I don't like America anymore. It is not the country that I grew up in. And Viv, what would you say about that? I mean, David will back me up on this because he's got stories of the same kind. Viv, America is a laughingstock now. I want to get back to the Virginia situation, just to highlight a point here, right?
What happened in Virginia is roughly 51% of people voted to make sure the other 49% of people were disenfranchised effectively. So Virginia is split pretty evenly, as most U.S. states are. It's slightly one way, it's slightly the other way. But it's not 11 to 1, or 10 to 1, rather, for Democrats over Republicans. You know what I mean?
Now, what's happened is because of the polarized nature of this current election, or the current situation, that the The Democrats won an election which allows them to basically kind of change how you count votes in different districts. So the Republicans are all in one district, so they can't actually affect it. And Democrats have a huge majority in all the other districts. So it becomes like when they go to Congress, they're going to get a massive discrepancy.
What's going to happen here is that you're going to have similar back and forth events happening across the whole of the U.S. And what this does is it fundamentally weakens the way the U.S. political system works. Which is, I mean, it's boring to start to talk about it, but this is important. The way the political system of the U.S. works is that, you know, you have a pretty even match between the Republicans and Democrats. I mean, you may say, OK, look at the last few elections.
You're winning by one or two percent. You're not winning by 50 percent. You know what I mean? But the way they are restricting these places is if you win by one or two percent, you're getting 50 percent or in this case, 90 percent more representation in the electorate or in the politics. It's good. make a much less stable political system in the US.
And the kind of thing that your friend talked about, about the hatred towards the other, is going to make the US a less stable country going forward, which is a terrible thing to happen. And like I said, it's this kind of situation we have right now. It's making the world a less safe place, as you mentioned. But it's not just a Trump thing. It's the impact of what Trump is doing right now and the effect it's having.
The longer term effects are going to be quite damaging to the overall stability of the US because, you know, the Republicans basically are obviously on one side with Trump, the Democrats like hate Trump and on the other side, and they are doing things that, you know, any logical person that's patriotic to the US would say this is a bad thing to do. If you're a patriotic Virginian, you wouldn't say it's a great thing that we effectively disenfranchised 49% of the electorate. You know what I mean?
But because you say we are bringing, we're kind of forcing Yeah. To see me as a people. We are doing this to get against Trump. And they have effectively disenfranchised 49% of the electorate, which is a bad thing, objectively. David, would you agree? Well, it was a move to counteract what they were going to do in Texas. This is what the Republicans wanted to do in Texas. So, you know, he sparked this off. But this is gerrymandering. It's common. This has happened.
I mean, if you know history in South Africa, the same thing happened here with the Nationalist Party. I mean, you know. You know? shoving everybody into one big area in Johannesburg, giving them one vote, and then the counter-district, all the small districts got many, many seats in parliament. But it's nothing new in politics. But what you say is correct. I mean, there's nothing in the middle. There's no one in the middle to be fair. You know, that's the problem.
When I say the Supreme Court, where's the balancing factor? And that's why we had a constitution. That's why they have the constitution, was to ensure that things like this don't happen. But somehow they never enforced. But what you're saying is, I think, is so true. And I say it in a different way. I always loved America. I always envied growing up as a 10-year-old or 11-year-old, you know. I'm looking at Norman Rockwell paintings. This is something foreign to you, Viv.
And even to, it used to be on the cover of the Life magazine, you know, the magazine of life. Norman Rockwell was a very well-known artist in the 50s and that he painted American life, you know, and you'd have a family sitting around the table cutting the turkey on Thanksgiving or a little boy eyeing a pie that was left on the ledge to... you know, to air or whatever you do with pies, you know, to cool down.
And those are the kind of scenes that he used to paint, this perfect American life, probably post-World War II. And, you know, baseball and those kind of things, playing baseball in the streets and so on. And it's so far away from that at the moment. It's just, it's nowhere close to. the perfect American life that everybody... If it weren't for your family, David, would you be visiting America? I don't think so. I don't, you know, I go there mainly to see family.
I enjoy New York and that, but I must admit that, you know, the kind of things that we're talking about now really concern me. And you've seen changes now even in New York. where you have the young mayor there who's now starting to impose taxes on the rich city. And you know what I say about New York? It was built by rich people. That's what makes New York. And once you start to undermine that, you're undermining the strength and the draw of the city. It runs on wealth.
You know, mega museums that need the funding to keep them going. You need Broadway, those kind of things. And the buildings, you know, those are the things that attract everybody to this vibrant city. You want to undermine that, boy, you're starting to chip at the foundations of the city and of the culture. Viv, the Brent crude oil price is $102.76 per barrel, which is up 0.8% on the day and probably up around about 10% since we spoke last Thursday, Viv.
Now, 3.1%... is the South African inflation rate, 3.3% CPI inflation rate, the annual inflation rate in the United Kingdom. Is this the calm before the storm, Viv, these sort of three numbers? Are we going to see four, five and six in the future? The IMF says 6%. What do you think? Most certainly. And it's going to get, I think, it's going to be long the last thing Trump says.
Trump says basically, you know, once it's over, it's going to all fall down quickly, blah, His own energy secretary came out and said, no, it's going to last until next year. We aren't going to see that the prices return to normal until next year. We've already seen, for instance, let's just say it ends tomorrow. You think India, you think China, you think all the countries in the world are going to just go back to buying the normal amount of oil that they were buying in the past?
No. They're going to be scrambling to just basically replenish the reserves that they've used up and maybe build up more reserves. After this has happened, it must be terrifying to be a leader of some of these countries. I mean, you have places in Asia, especially, where they have gone to work from home by law, where they've basically implemented different policies about, you know, going to school and that kind of stuff. They've been really badly hit.
And the impact of this is going to be, even if the physical stuff is removed in the next, say, week or two, fingers crossed, you know, there is a deal to be done, though I think it's unlikely. Just the psychological impact of what's happened right now. It's going to cause stockpiling. It's going to cause reserve building. It's going to cause changes in how people are going to be basically purchasing oil, etc. The market's going to take a long time to recover.
And I have not even talked about food, which is a terrible thing. Unfortunately, it won't affect the places in the world that we invest in.
It won't be a case where you're worrying about, for instance, you know, the Zonda Stock Exchange or the New York Stock Exchange or, you know, Frankfurt or Shanghai, etc. but in many parts of the world, the impact of this... particular thing on fertilizer and therefore on food is going to be drastic and quite, I think, painful, which we have to be concerned about going forward. Okay. And yes, David, the market is, let's have a look at the market now.
The S&P 500 futures, the S&P 500 futures June, the June contract is 7,177, which is unchanged on the day, David. And I don't want to look at it over the last week. or month because it's up. I can't understand it. Please tell me why. You know what? The only explanation I can give is that tech is having a massive impact on this market. And, you know, I talk about the two-lane highway, and that one lane, the speedier lane, the fast lane, just keeps going. And the more we look into it.
You know, the more attractive it is, and I'm just looking at some of the, you know, at some of the gains that are taking place at the moment, there's still a massive demand for quality tech shares. You know, Alphabet's up, Apple's up, Amazon, Broadcom, all of these companies are up. You know, one or two are slightly down, but overall, the focus is on tech earnings. And then also... One thing, you know, we've been talking about the energy and the need for energy.
And GE, Vinnova came out yesterday with fabulous results, way up on where they were last year, simply on the demand for, you know, for power. And all those companies around that are benefiting as well. So I think that's what's holding the U.S. up. And, Lindsay, I'll come back to a statement which, you know, which I've spoken to you often and mentioned it in our talks. America, when you go there, they don't care. They're living their own lives. Exactly.
The people in my building are more worried about what's showing on Broadway or which restaurant to go through or whatever. They're not impacted by this. They don't even watch the news, local news, just concerns about the weather and, as I say, a fire in Brooklyn or whatever it is. And that's why you're seeing this, you know, the market as strong as it is. for most people. In America, they're focusing on the underlying earnings.
It's the rest of the world that are suffering from the impact that Viv is talking about. You know, food, oil prices, energy prices, just getting to work on a daily basis. Before we go to the markets, Viv, can you give us any updates on AI this week, on tech this week? Because you're the one that's probably got his finger on the pulse more than David and I have. Not that we haven't, of course. Viv, anything happening this week? I would like to give you a little run-on on stats here.
This is Anthropic, right? This is the company that's got the best model out there despite having less money, etc. And it's like, they could argue why they did it. Maybe they got more ethical, they got to attract better people, whatever. This is a real breakdown. In 2024, they were making a million, 100 billion dollars a year, annual recurring revenue. By the end of that year, it went up 10 times to 1 billion. By the end of 2035, we went up 10 times to, what, 9 times to 9 billion.
By February, it is up to 14 billion. By April, which we are at right now, it's at 30 billion. They're on track to get 100 billion this year. They have gone up 10 times every year since they started operating, basically, in terms of annual revenue. Okay, so extrapolate that. Extrapolate that, if you would. Extrapolate that by next year, they're making 1% of global GDP. And the year after that, they're making 10% of global GDP a year. It is an impossible stat.
But you know, I spoke to, just on that. I spoke to an analyst and a young chap there at one of the very large wealth companies. I'm talking globally. And he's such an entertaining and knowledgeable person. And he gave it, you know, he said exactly what you're saying. He said, but the one thing that he said that it's engineers that are using it. They are the ones who are, he called it tokens. And the way he explained it to me, you know, to us, he said, look, it's like electricity.
You know, Anthropic provides electricity.
chat GPT provide electricity you know you plug your your kettle in or something like that that's what they're giving you that energy you know and and trying to exploit it in very basic terms but um he he what he said is that's that's the thing it's not the casual users it's not me or river or lindsey you know kind of designing or doing something with it it's engineers you know who are designing who are using it to to write code And that's what encouraged him.
You know, that's why he was so excited about what you're saying. Look at it this way, right? The $20 a month, you know, package, which is what most people get. I mean, I have the $20 a month package. I might be looking at the $200 a month package now because it's more useful. But the $20 a month package, right?
If you had a billion people, right, a billion people affording $20 a month, which probably has many people in the world that can afford to spend $20 a month on AI, that roughly translates to about $240 billion, you know, dollars. a year. That's if like this is as many people that spend the money spend it on Anthropic, that's all they get. Apparently, OpenAI has also got about 30 billion dollars in edge quotes ARR at the moment.
And the Chinese models, apparently the six most used models in the world are Chinese. So it's in these two companies. So the demand for this these tokens are going up and the reason is because of the agents. The agents with that continuous referring back to you know that loops that they're using.
are really driving up demand for this, as well as, of course, the thinking models, which basically, again, have the loop in them that basically make them use much more data than the output, or much more tokens than the output.
So, yeah, it does appear that, you know, as David said, you know, there's a famous world you ran a quote, I think it is, people focus on the stream when all the stuff is really happening on the banks, we mean you focus on the war and the death and whatnot, and all the really important stuff is happening with technology and, you know, culture. And this is the case here. We are focusing on Iran and all the crazy stuff is happening with the culture, with the technology.
And I honestly believe in like, say, 100 years from now, if you look back at this time, let's just say we're also alive in the future, who might be because of AI. We will think back as to this is the start of AI. This is not the start of, you know, the Iran war, whatever happens. Like we think back to the early 2000s. Yes, there was 9-11.
But, you know, we probably in the future are going to remember it more for the start when the Internet companies like, you know, Google and… Facebooks and so on started in the early 2000s, as opposed to, yes, we had this major terrorist attack in the US. Gentlemen. Get it. Yeah, a silence there, a stunned silence. But I'm going to break that silence by saying the names of three companies, David, Valterra, Cecil, they came up with updates and they're both down today.
That's because of international markets a little bit as well. But the updates weren't particularly good. Share price is down. Clicks. Clicks, clicks, David. Clicks down 8.25%. Did you read the update from clicks? I'm sorry to say I haven't. Stun silence again. You know what I did read? That's why. What I was focusing on was another beauty company called L'Oreal, which is the opposite of clicks, the international, which is up about 8%. But while you are on it. 8.8, which is unusual.
It came up with a trading update, so obviously it came up with something. And I know that you don't invest in that. Yeah, exactly. Okay, so you don't know. So let's not harp upon that. But anyway, the point is that it was a bad day on the JSC today, and I picked out three companies, Clix, Volterra, and Sasol, driving it down. Let me give you some prices now, because it's interesting. Let me get rid of that little tab that's just jumped up on my screen, which I hate. The dollar round is 1647.
The British pound against the round is 2225. The euro round is 1930. Euro dollar is 11765. The gold price is unchanged at 4737. The platinum price is down 2%. 2043 and yeah it's it's not a good day for commodities actually and i'm going to go straight now to the oil price which i i told you earlier on and i was using it as a reference to viv question. And the question is now, where's it going? And the question to me is now people are saying, oh, well, we're used to it now.
When Lindsay Williams says it's $103.08 per barrel, up 1.1%, a big deal, we're used to. But the figures will start to come through, the 3.1%, the 3.3% inflation rates. I don't know. Is this something that we should be sanguine about? It's 103.20 now, the oil price up. up one and a quarter percent. The West Texas is $93.77. The copper price, which is important, $6.09 per pound, which is down half a percent. The South African 10-year bond yield is 8.625 percent on the close, up seven basis points.
The U.S. 10-year, this is the one I'm interested in now 4.29%. I think that's going to 5, 550. by the end of the year but that's just me uh s p 500 futures we mentioned them earlier 7178 up very very slightly on the day and bitcoin is uh 78 368 so that's what a one percent one percent fall david the market's looking a little bit a little bit fragile looking a little bit cracked if you like. Yeah. You've gone. The inflation number that we, I'm here. Are you there? There you are now, yes.
Thank you. Okay. You know, the inflation number yesterday, which was 3%, 3.1%, doesn't reflect what lies ahead. And as you go on about the oil price, it's very serious for countries like South Africa. And I think there is a deep fear that it's going to eat into profits, eat into margins, and certainly hurt the... consumer, because oil and travel is a big, travel, petrol is a big part of our economy, not only from private people, but from businesses as well.
And I think there is this concern about where rates are going. And then on the other hand, you've got falling commodity prices that we saw today, oil down. They're not going anywhere, Lindsay. The gold's at 4,700, having been at 5'3". or higher than that. And I think it's concerning people. We're not going to repeat what we saw last year. So our markets are fragile. Our market is very, very fragile. And the retailers are reflecting that.
I don't know what happened to Clix, because while you were talking, I looked at the major issue, and there was nothing there. There's nothing there at all, actually. It says here, group turnover up 7.4%, trading margin. maintained at 9.1%. Viv, when was the last time you went to clicks? Viv Govender, you must have gone to clicks recently. Yeah, I prove my local pharmacy, but I do go to clicks occasionally.
And look, I mean, it's obviously a purchase that people have to make, but a lot of stuff is like people say, obviously driven by the luxury demand because a lot of the money comes from things that throw a few money and so on and toiletries. The one thing I want to talk about is that you talked about the Federal Reserve interest rate going to 5% this year. Do you really believe that's going to be the case with Washington? No, no, the US 10-year, the US 10-year. That's what I think.
But anyway, it's the same thing. With the Fed basically coming, you know, with the Fed chair changing, do you think that might not be something that the markets may be overestimating? Because I think he's going to be a lot more dovish, because that's what Trump is bringing in place for. He has said, his phrase was, wash the new Fed chair. He said he will not... be a glove puppet. He will not be Trump's glove puppet. So, in other words, he's set out his stool.
He's saying that, but does he believe it? I don't know. Viv, I don't think that they can cut rates much more with gas prices at 4.20 a gallon in the United States across the many states, I think. If you look at Trump's people he's put in this time around, they have been sock puppets. They've been Cash Patel, Hexit. Even people like that Trustee Noem was replaced, he basically has been choosing people for loyalty. And I don't know if the Fed chair is going to be different.
And I do honestly think that if you had to basically bet on what the market thinks the logical thing for the Fed to do for the year and what the actual outcome for the Fed for the year is, you wouldn't be too off base to basically assume that whatever the logical, normal, average Fed chair would have done in the past, this person is going to be basically one or two cuts below that.
you know in terms of outcomes uh so i i wanted to like you know basically maybe a half percent or a quarter percent below what the normal uh reaction is going to be uh by a fed share and i think that's something to be concerned about another that's weakening the long-term stability of the U.S. And this is what I want to highlight. It's what's happening in the U.S. right now. It's not just what Trump is doing now.
It's the effect on the long-term stability of the country that's going to last way after his leaving power, you know, hopefully in a couple of years' time. On the JSC today, Anglo-American up 5.1%, British-American tobacco up 2.5%, Aspen up 2.4%, Boxer up one and a third, and MTN at 1.1% on the downside, Clix down 8.3%. Karoo down 5%, Northam's down nearly 5%, and Diskem, after Clix, down 4.8%. Anything else you're seeing, David? I think you've covered most of them.
Just on Clix, do you know that we're back to where we were in 2020? That's how far down this company. I'm quite shattered by that, you know, because this was one of these dependable businesses that you thought would just go up and up. And we kept saying, oh, you know, it's it's you can rely on it. It's dependable. And I'm actually shattered to see how far back it has come down. It's quite a worry. So wait a second. Say that again. Where are we now? If I look at a chart.
The share price is 275.88 I've got. So what is that? Okay. So if we go back, if I go back to, this is where it was in 2023. But if you go further down the line, you know, it's kind of the same area that it was in 2021. And it reached peaks. round about 20, I'm just looking here, at the end of 24, fell up again in 2025, a year ago. So one year ago, we had this at 339,000, call it 700. We're down to where? 28,000, 29,000 now, or below that, 28,000. That's the kind of fall that we see.
Dramatic fall. And I think it's It's, it's, it's. In fact, right across the board that we're starting to see retailers falling similarly. So it always pays to have a look at a chart, but I'm actually quite shaken about this one. I don't follow companies in that, but I'm quite surprised at the kind of fall that we have seen in a company which was like pick and pay, the mainstay of the retail sector. Bang goes my crystal challenge. Did you? Listen, I'm with you. I also got all the retailers.
I was full with them saying this is going to be the year. This is going to be the year. Yeah. Exactly. Okay. Oh, dear. Okay, gentlemen, what a fascinating chat. Thank you very much for your time. Viv Govender is from Rann, Swiss, in Johannesburg. David, also from the same city. David Shapiro from Sasson Securities. And that was the 5 o'clock shadow.
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