COMPANY NEWS IN BRIEF

Eight Game stores closing in SA

Eight Game outlets will be closing soon, Massmart confirmed on Tuesday. Some 700 employees could potentially lose their jobs.

Three months ago, the group started with a section 189 retrenchment process with these workers.

"We are still in discussions with staff to finalise closure dates," a spokesperson said. "As is always the case, we will apply our best efforts to identify opportunities for redeployment of the affected staff members within the broader Massmart Group."

Game has been a thorn in the side for Massmart, being the major contributor to the company's loss of more than R900 million in just six months to end-June. At its results presentation last month, the company said it wanted to "divest" from 14 Game stores in east and west Africa, as well as 15 Game stores in South Africa.

At the end of last year, it identified 13 local stores that were "underperforming [and] non-core", of which eight will now be closed.

Game is currently running an advertising campaign for the shutdowns, proclaiming that "everything must go" at these stores, with large discounts on all products.

Last month, Massmart's US owner, the retail giant Walmart, announced that it wanted to buy out minority shareholders and delist the company from the JSE. Massmart also owns Makro and Builders Warehouse. -Fin24

Afrigen to start human trials for vaccine

Afrigen Biologics & Vaccines plans to start human trials of its Covid-19 vaccine candidate by May, part of a World Health Organisation-backed plan to develop locally-made inoculations in the developing world.

Afrigen, which is part of the WHO’s mRNA vaccine technology transfer hub in Cape Town, said in a joint statement the vaccine has shown “a strong immune response” in pre-clinical trials in mice. The vaccine was made by copying the publicly-available sequence of the Moderna shot provided by Stanford University.

The next stage, the so-called phase 1, 2 trial, will involve about 150 people at sites near Cape Town with the aim of including both vaccinated and unvaccinated people and proving whether it can be used as an initial dose or a booster, said Petro Terblanche, Afrigen’s managing director.

The WHO set up the hub, its first, in June last year to address concerns poor countries weren’t getting sufficient access to life-saving Covid shots as the bulk of them went to affluent countries where major vaccine producers such as Moderna, Pfizer and BioNtech are based.

The locally-developed shots could end up being made by at least 15 production facilities in low- and middle-income countries around the world. -Fin24

WBHO dragged into a loss

Construction firm Wilson Bayly Holmes-Ovcon (WBHO) has crashed into a full-year headline loss representing more than a third of its R4.8 billion market value, taking a severe hit after pulling the plug on its embattled Probuild unit in Australia.

WBHO posted a R1.96 billion headline loss in its year to end-June, from earnings of R329.4 million previously, taking about a R3 billion whack from Probuild, which went into business rescue in February.

The more than 50-year-old group's struggles with two Australian projects had prompted its first-ever operational loss in its 2020 year when it made a headline loss of R490.7 million, while its decision to stop funding Probuild followed tough trading conditions amid severe Covid-19 restrictions, as well as a deteriorating diplomatic relationship between China and Australia.

At the time that funding was withdrawn, the business climate in Australia was highly uncertain and difficult to predict, WBHO said on Tuesday. "The political tension between Australia and China and the collapse of the Chinese property sector created further uneasiness, as Chinese developers have historically formed a large proportion of Probuild’s client base and China is a major supplier of goods to the construction industry in Australia," it said. -Fin24

AgriKool connecting farmers with the market

The outbreak of Covid-19 in 2020 was devastating to many sectors, but for a fledging agritech enterprise in the KwaZulu-Natal Midlands, the pandemic opened up a window of opportunity.

AgriKool, a youth-led startup established three years ago, connects farmers with the market. It secured its first contract with a retail supermarket in Pietermaritzburg at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic.

It's founder and CEO Zamokuhle Thwala established it in 2019 after he quit working as a farmer, and his vision was to use it to solve the challenges he encountered in the industry.

The enterprise is an e-marketplace for fresh produce growers around Pietermaritzburg and outlying areas, sourcing a range of vegetables from emerging farmers to sell to informal and formal traders.

A Boxer supermarket in Pietermaritzburg was AgriKool's first big retail customer.

Thwala believes that "had the supply chain been not disrupted, the Boxer supermarket would not have allowed us the opportunity to supply them".

"We had ambitions to supply retailers, but there was a lot of bureaucracy around compliance issues," said Thwala.

"In the middle of 2020, we got a call from a local Boxer to supply the store with cabbages, [and] that changed many things for the company," said Thwala. -Fin24