THE STATE OF PLAY
South African brand culture enters 2025–2026 on firmer economic ground than it has stood on in a decade. The grid that throttled the economy has loosened its grip: the country ran more than 300 load-shedding-free days in 2024 and extended, uninterrupted stretches into 2025, with Eskom crediting a generation-recovery plan launched in 2023 and a wave of private-sector solar investment. The government of national unity formed after the May 2024 election has, so far, held the reform line — including the structural unbundling of Eskom that produced a separate National Transmission Company. Growth forecasts have crept upward in response, from roughly 1.3% in 2025 toward 1.6% in 2026 and close to 2% by 2027. This is not a boom. It is the absence of catastrophe, and in South Africa that is enough to change how brands behave.
Against that backdrop, the consumer is stretched but discerning, and the brands winning are the ones that convert cultural fluency into convenience and trust. The clearest example is Checkers. Shoprite Holdings, its parent, pushed group sales past R250 billion for the financial year to June 2025, with Checkers itself growing 13.8% and its Sixty60 on-demand delivery service surging 47.7%. Sixty60 now claims more than 80% of South Africa's on-demand grocery-delivery market, and on-demand digital sales rose a further 34.6% in the six months to December 2025. Shoprite added a net 262 stores in twelve months to reach 2,747 supermarkets. A grocery app has become a genuine cultural object — a status signal in middle-class WhatsApp groups and a logistics moat rivals are scrambling to match.
The banking story is even starker. Capitec, built to serve customers the old banks called 'unbankable,' reported 24.1 million active clients for the year to February 2025 — more than half of South Africa's adult population — and headline earnings up 30% to R13.7 billion. By market capitalisation, around R407 billion, it overtook FirstRand and Standard Bank to become the most valuable bank on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange. Crucially, it holds a commanding 58% share among 16-to-35-year-olds. Capitec did not out-spend the incumbents on brand; it out-understood the market, which is the quieter and more durable form of power.
Not everyone is thriving. Pick n Pay, once the archetype of South African retail, posted an attributable loss of R3.2 billion in 2024 and a R1.5 billion trading loss in its core supermarket division. It survived on a R3.9 billion rights issue (106% over-subscribed) and by monetising its healthiest asset — the discount chain Boxer — through an IPO that raised close to R8 billion, followed by a further R4.7 billion accelerated sale of Boxer stock to fund the turnaround. Woolworths, meanwhile, showed the split-screen clearly: market-leading Food growth above 11% offset by a struggling fashion arm and a loss-making Australian business. MonoKromatik's read: the retail table is being reset around who owns logistics, data and the low-income mass market — and legacy prestige is no longer a defence.