SIMON BROWN: I’m chatting now with [independent analyst] Kea Nonyana. Kea, I appreciate the early morning time. You and I have chatted about Aspen before. To be honest, I hadn’t actually looked at the chart in a bit, and then I looked at it earlier this week. It was at R280/share in September last year and yesterday [October 6, 2022] it closed just below R140/share.
KEA NONYANA: They stay in the defensive end, and you can see it in the average revenue growth over certain periods. Seeing that it’s not consistently knockout 20%, 30% revenue growth, but just above-inflation revenue growth, which shows the defensive nature, even through tough economic times you will continue to buy your OTC drugs. I think the value in these businesses lies in the manufacturing capacity, and Aspen has shown that over time.
SIMON BROWN: Let’s move from the drug manufacturers to the hospital groups. We have three listed now. Mediclinic, which of course is under potential takeover, Netcare and Life Healthcare. Again, elective surgeries are returning, and I appreciate that we are under pressure as citizens. But these stocks are trading almost at their pandemic lows. Both Life Healthcare and Netcare are only just off the lows which they made in late 2020.
SIMON BROWN: Is it ‘preference between’, or ‘a case of’? I’m ignoring, as I said, Mediclinic because of the proposed takeover by Remgro and Mediterranean Shipping, but Netcare and Life Healthcare frankly just look [equally] cheap.