The Editor's Desk - Mon 2 Fed 2026: Shoprite’s avalanche, Mining optimism, and the AI threat to software

Shoprite is crushing it while AI fears are hammering software stocks – join me as I explore what these major shifts mean for your portfolio. We also look at BHP’s vote of confidence in Orion Minerals and uncover fresh insights on the ‘Goolam’ mystery..Don't miss out on future episodes of The Editor's Desk. Subscribe to BizNews Premium and get the podcast delivered to your inbox daily..Listen here.Edited transcript of today's Editor's Desk episode.This is the Editor’s Desk exclusive analysis for BizNews Premium members. Today is Monday, the 2nd of February 2026. I’m glad to have you with me. You’ll find a couple of reports on BizNews.com drawn from the latest in the Stock Exchange News Service, including sparkling numbers from Shoprite. And that is the market leader that just seems to be getting stronger and stronger. It’s hard to believe now when you have a look at the Shoprite vs Pick n Pay comparisons, but Shoprite was half the size of Pick n Pay a couple of decades ago, and then Pick n Pay lost the plot completely. They brought in people from abroad to run a company that was going well, but suddenly started doing things very, very wrong. How much of that was due to Raymond Ackerman—the founder of the organisation—not seeing the changes, and how much of it was due to Shoprite just being that much better? While he is acknowledged now as probably the greatest retailer that South Africa has seen, probably ever—and I’m sure that’s a huge statement—what Shoprite has become, continuing along the Whitey Basson model, is now like an avalanche, like a big snowball. It gets stronger and stronger. These trading updates show that the company’s prices grew on average by less than 1%. The industry’s prices grew on average by 4.7%. So what is happening is Shoprite, by getting higher volumes, is able to keep its prices down. And it reminds me of what SAB Miller did when it became the sole supplier eventually of beer in South Africa. I remember talking to Meyer Kahn, who incidentally was a retailer as well at OK Bazaars, which was then part of the SAB operation. When Meyer took over as the head of the beer operation, he explained that the model was very simple: it was to produce more beer and sell more beer so that you could then reduce the annual cost prices to less than inflation. That became a moat against which nobody else could come in. Of course, you needed to have great quality as well, but if you were able to have that advantage with volumes, you become unbeatable. SAB proved that in the South African market, and Shoprite is proving the same thing. We’ve got Pick n Pay in our portfolio, and Pick n Pay is cheap by any standards. If Pick n Pay were not around and all you had was its stake in Boxer, you would be sitting in a premium position to where you are today. Our bet on Pick n Pay is that Sean Summers will turn it around. I spoke to him the other day and he said he’s definitely driving faster to work than he drives home, which tells you something about his enthusiasm for the task at hand. But Shoprite... okay, it’s like anybody who’s invested in a bank other than Capitec; you can just see that their model is right and they just keep getting stronger and stronger, growing market share. Today’s trading update shows it. A trading update we didn't miss came from Orion Minerals, and it is very exciting. You will remember that Peter Major has been telling us about Orion Minerals and its wonderful endowment of copper in the Northern Cape of South Africa. What today’s trading update tells us is that BHP Billiton has done a deal with Orion—not on Okiep or Prieska, the big operations that it’s bringing to account, but on unexplored other opportunities in the area. In other words, exploration potential outside of its existing operations. It’s not often that an organisation gets selected by BHP Billiton for this endowment, and that’s happened with Orion. It shows that what BHP is doing is almost like outsourcing its exploration to juniors in the hope that those juniors will find something really exciting. Then BHP has the inside track to do the deal. Well, it’s big news. It hasn’t done much to the share price of Orion today, but I guess we shouldn’t really be surprised about that because the Orion share price has been on an absolute tear. If you go back over the past month, it’s come from 23c to 41c today; it got as high as 45c on Friday, perhaps in anticipation of this BHP announcement. But you have "The Big Australian" giving you a vote of confidence. That’s something that Orion shareholders can be very happy about. And we as the BizNews tribe can once again say thank you to Peter Major, who explained the opportunity to us. There are two other stories that I’d like to touch on. One is from our partners at the Financial Times of London. The FT have a number of unbelievable columnists, but the best of them for me is Jemima Kelly. She writes beautifully, and she wrote today about the "longevity sales pitch" under the headline of "Who Wants to Live Forever?" She points out that people in Silicon Valley are spending gazillions trying to find ways to become immune to the one thing that is absolutely certain in our life. She says there is lots of hype about lifespans being extended indefinitely, but in the past month, it does appear as though we have now reached "peak life." There was an article in Nature a while back which said that the proportion of people living to 100 this century is unlikely to ever exceed 15% for women and 5% for men. And yet, you would probably have heard at dinner parties how those of us alive today were all going to live to 120. Well, Jemima says that kind of talk is nonsense. It’s largely hype-driven. She also takes us into the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas last month, where some of the most popular gadgets were to do with longevity. There was an $899 "longevity mirror" that she writes about; if you stand in front of it for 30 seconds, it’ll calculate a score to tell you how well you’re ageing. Then there’s a $600 "longevity station" that measures your body composition and assesses your health across more than 60 biomarkers. It’s a great column and really well worth reading. The other piece that I would point you towards today comes from our partners at The Economist, who have had a close look at what’s going on with software stocks. Last week SAP, which is a very well-known software company, saw its share price go down 15%. This wasn't for any reason other than a slight deceleration in the revenue growth of its cloud software operations. A slight deceleration, and the share price was down 15%. It’s been a similar story elsewhere. A company called ServiceNow beat revenue forecasts but dropped 13% on its results. Similarly, Salesforce was down 7% and Workday down 8%, even though those numbers were not unimpressive. The biggest pointer, though, was Microsoft, which dropped 10% after its financial results. One would think, with what’s going on with software now, that our star performer in the BizNews portfolio—Palantir—had to come down to earth at some point. The results come out tonight after the South African markets close. The last set of results had revenues up 60%, and Wall Street analysts are expecting another 60% jump. If it doesn’t get it, watch out. Palantir's share price has already come under quite a lot of pressure lately, perhaps in sympathy for what’s going on in the whole software sector. Palantir is down 13% at $146 a share. The stock was trading in November at over $200 a share. So, why aren't we selling the shares? Well, because we bought them as a long-term investment in the Shift portfolio at under $9 a share. We believe it’s a great company. It might have been excessively pushed, but it’s a great business. What you need to do first and foremost is identify a great business and then make a standard investment every month; you will buy progressively more shares when the stock price is down and fewer shares when the stock price is expensive. In the portfolio, we've been buying relatively few shares in Palantir while the price has been high, but in the next month, if it stays where it is now, we will buy relatively more. Adobe is another stock we had in our portfolio. I really loved it because we use a lot of Adobe products, but we got out of it about a year or so ago. Looking back, the Adobe share price has dropped 33% in the past year. The reason for all of this is very simple: investors are terrified about the impact of Artificial Intelligence on software companies. AI is enhancing the ability of people with little knowledge to produce coding tools, letting them put together products that in the past they had to buy from software companies. Now, through AI, a lot of those tools can be produced by someone sitting in front of a computer just asking the right questions. That is why software stocks have come under so much pressure. I’m going to leave it there for today. There’s so much on BizNews for you to access. I’d point you towards the Sunday show; Chris Steyn spoke again this week to Colonel Chris Wyatt. They have good chemistry and Chris Wyatt certainly has some wonderful insights. He spoke about the Golem story and also focused on the name of Jacob Zuma emerging in the Jeffrey Epstein files. That and more is on the Sunday show—well worth watching or listening to. Thanks for trusting us with your time. I’m Alec Hogg, until tomorrow. Cheerio.

The Editor's Desk - Mon 2 Fed 2026: Shoprite’s avalanche, Mining optimism, and the AI threat to software

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