Alec Hogg's Blog Covering Ecomonic Events

Welcome Cell C, Mobile Market Disruptor-in-Chief. At last.

16th October 201316th October 2013

The directors at Vodacom must be kicking themselves for not ensuring founding CEO Alan Knott-Craig was kept in permanent retirement. He has become their worst nightmare. Just 20 months after joining Saudi-owned Cell-C, Knott-Craig’s perseverance is turning SA’s cosy cell phone duopoly on its head. Investors knocked R40bn off the value of Vodacom and MTN … Read more

Brody’s brilliant stewardship of the House built by the World’s Best Entrepreneur

12th October 201312th October 2013

This week’s UNDICTATED focuses on a very special man, the late Bill Lynch. A humble, undramatic, focused person, he was made in the mould of great business leaders immortalized in Jim Collins’ classic Good To Great. Lynch would make any list of SA’s top five entrepreneurs of the modern era. Indeed, he is the only … Read more

Drift – the cancer quietly eating away at SA, while we fail to pay attention

14th October 201312th October 2013

If I were ever to leave the entrepreneurial way and re-enter corporate life, Johann Redelinghuys is the man I’d ask to help open the right doors. Johann, an industrial psychologist and partner at Heidrick & Struggles, is the country’s top “headhunter”. We’ve known each other for a long time. So when he invited us to … Read more

Bezos approach to newspaper business – focus on readers. Rocket science not.

7th October 20137th October 2013

My latest Rational Alternative column for the Financial Mail provided the opportunity for some navel gazing. That’s not terribly comfortable when you’re in an industry experiencing the sharp end of economist Joseph Schumpeter’s theory of Creative Destruction. But in every collapse, opportunities do emerge. So those of us in the mire seek inspiration from creative … Read more

Newsletter 4 October: Welcoming Gugu into the other Power Lunch seat – watch us fly!

15th November 20135th October 2013

Hi there, My sincere apologies. On Tuesday evening we worked with our hosting partner to switch Biznewz from its original .biz address to the recently acquired .com. This is a complicated process. During the transfer, a few nasty coding gremlins worked their way into the system. As a result, we had to hang up the … Read more

Mr Market shrugs as Capitec’s brilliant iconoclast sells shares, says he’s leaving.

2nd October 20132nd October 2013

We’ve been paying a lot of attention to Capitec. It’s a phenomenal story of a micro-lender that has gone mainstream, ploughing in the high profits from its unsecured lending into creating a transaction fee base now approaching R1bn a year. But as serious problems have emerged for its core business, questions have been raised around … Read more

Newsletter 27 September: Suggested reading list for JZ – and anyone wanting to expand their knowledge base

10th March 201528th September 2013

Hi there, It might have been a short week for the rest of South Africa, but we’ve had a belter on Biznewz. Traffic on the site has set a succession of records thanks to some superb blogs and articles as you’ll see from the list of our Best Read Stories at the bottom of the … Read more

The ingrained Law of Reciprocation – a Solomonite dilemma for our modern age

30th September 201328th September 2013

I love writing a weekly column for the Financial Mail. It is a licence to challenge aspects of business life we all recognise are important, but don’t necessarily have time to think about. It also allows me to express rational opinions on subjects often too thorny for polite conversation. Like this week’s one on reciprocity. … Read more

With Competition case concluded, Zuma’s message: “Prepare to meet Construction Boom”

26th September 201325th September 2013

People like me go on about the need to embrace complexity. How we must admit we know a lot less than we think; and how each new discovery is like peeling an onion – we’re suddenly confronted with a whole new layer of stuff that was previously hidden to us. So best to know what … Read more