Telkom rings bells on the JSE as top stock

This year, to everyone's surprise, it was Telkom - otherwise in the media for all the wrong reasons - that shot out the lights on the JSE. The share price of the 38%-state-controlled telecoms operator has shot up 143% so far.

Telkom , under Sipho Maseko's leadership, has been trying to reorganise itself. It recently published mixed interim results in which profit fell 62% due to the costs of retrenchments. Revenue was stable at R13.3-billion and operating expenses fell 2% to R9.2-billion.

This week, it settled its headache with Nigeria's Multi-Links Telecommunications.

Astral Foods, the broiler chicken producer, was the second best performing company, with its stock up 66.8%. Earlier this month, it reported an 88% surge in operating profit, while headline earnings jumped 99% and it declared a R2.40 dividend.

The group is expected to continue deliver these sort of results, especially after the government announced last week that it may ban imported chickens due to a bird flu scare in Asia.

Another great performer for the year was Pioneer Foods, which produced remarkable annual results. The company, as Anchor Capital pointed out, has been staging a recovery since the 2013 write-down of the poultry unit it off-loaded and as it exits its agreement with PepsiCo.

It also completed the unbundling of Quantum Foods in October. The R32.7-billion company's share price surged 60.6% this year.

The only banks to feature in the top 20 stocks for 2014 were Capitec and FirstRand, whose share prices gained 48.8% and 37.4% respectively.

In retail, the stocks that did superbly included The Foschini Group, which owns TotalSports, Donna Claire and Markham. Its shares swelled by 46%. Last month the group launched an online retail platform for all of its 17 store brands. The group reported a 9.7% increase in turnover and 8% lift in headline earnings per share for the half year.

On its heels was Durban-based Mr Price, with a share price gain of 33%.

The cash-based retailer recently told the market that its interim profits would increase by 23%, even as most retailers were singing a gloomy chorus about the state of the retail sector.

Other best-performing stocks that investors should have put their 2012 year-end bonuses into include Zeder, which added 65%; Resilient Property Income Fund, up 54%; RMI Holdings, up 50% ; Sibanye Gold, up 49%; and Aspen Pharmacare, which added 46.3%.