Pick n Pay is starting to gain some useful insights into customer behaviour and purchasing decisions at different stores. They’re using coffee as a key product to better understand who buys what, where and when. They’re tossing out (more likely de-emphaszing) LSMs as a method of categorising customers and moving to more sophisticated measures (including…
The laminated card in the seat pocket of the SAA Boeing 737-800 I’m flying in describes how I can use most devices in “flight mode” once in the air. It’s dated November 2011, but I’m quite sure I’ve still heard cabin crew telling people off for not having their phones off over the last two…
The New Companies Act (2008) looks like it will actually be in force from 1 May 2011. The regulations that provide much of the detail around how the Act will be implemented in practice are now also available.
When companies value pension obligations and required contribution rates, they make assumptions about the expected future investment returns. (Accounting standards require market-based rates reflecting fixed interest returns, but that’s a separate point). So what assumptions are pension funds making? The WSJ has an interesting article showing that the average US pension fund is assuming future…
Decreasing interconnect fees was supposed to lower telecoms costs, promote competition and create world peace. It’s done none of these because the logic underlying it was flawed. Analysts focused on interconnect as an expense, happily ignoring the revenue side (since it was a fee paid to another company within the industry). Never has a telecoms…
According to a Fin24 story this morning, the FSB is probing smaller unit trusts. The economics of a fund manager depends entirely on growing funds under management so that revenues (based on assets under management) grow to be larger than costs (significantly fixed and at most semi-variable). Details of performance fees and the second order…
Lightstone have a trick up their sleeves. Their raison d’être is collecting, analysing, understanding and packaging data for themselves and others to use to understand past, current and future property valuations. Their housing price index is more robust (and more independent) than those of the banks based off their own data and target markets. Rather…
I haven’t played Monopoly in a while (preferring Settlers of Catan, Carcasonne, Tigris and Euphrates and even Cranium), but after a recent conversation I started thinking about the game dynamics. There is surprisingly much that is relevant to the current story of our economy. 1 The Competition Commission is necessary Monopolies serve to increase prices…
