A common theme for South African companies for the best part of the past decade has been diversification. Egged on by foreign investors who had taken a keen interest in their prospects because of the flood of cheap dollars and their supposed good governance (until the Steinhoff shock), local executives moved to de-risk their businesses from their troublesome home base.
I'll be the first to admit that since the first warnings of the withdrawal of stimulus by the US Federal Reserve in the middle of 2013, the fundamentals of emerging-market countries such as ours were no longer as attractive. Panicked by signs of these deteriorating fundamentals, boards and their CEOs sought different geographies for future growth.
For some, the answer to the insatiable demand for growth from investors such as US hedge-fund billionaire John Paulson was expansion into other emerging markets.
Given the report cards of Woolworths and Sasol, which chose Australia and the US for expansion projects, we can safely assume an expansion into the rest of Africa has proved the better bet.
Ian Moir took Woolworths into a retail market in Australia where department stores such as the one it bought, David Jones, were like rabbits stuck in the headlights.
It has proved an expensive adventure into a market of no more than 24-million people, which is likely to be further disrupted by the recent entry of Amazon. A 2017 Morgan Stanley report warned that Jeff Bezos's "Death Star" would take a $12bn (about R170bn) bite out of the market within a decade...