By Yazeed Osman
Walmart proposed 21 new South African stores in February. Takealot turned its first profit in its first full year competing directly with Amazon.
At first glance, these look like two very different retail stories. I think they point to the same thing.
Some of the world’s best-resourced businesses are becoming increasingly careful about pretending they know what happens next.
And there is an important lesson in that for South African businesses.
Certainty has become expensive
On Friday evening, 21 August 2026, Canada’s Prime Minister Mark Carney pulled his negotiators out of Washington and sent them home.
Weeks of negotiations had produced what Carney described as real progress. Canada had a shared border, a free trade agreement and one of the most deeply integrated bilateral trading relationships in the world.
It still wasn’t enough to produce certainty.
By the following morning, 50% American tariffs were in effect on around $20 billion of Canadian goods, with Ottawa promising to respond dollar for dollar.
South Africa has experienced its own version of this uncertainty.
Over the past 18 months, our exporters have navigated a 30% US tariff, its legal basis being struck down, a subsequent 10% rate, and then a fresh 12.5% tariff under different legislation. Vehicles remain subject to a separate 25% tariff, while AGOA currently runs only until the end of December.
Four regimes under different statutes in 18 months.
For a business deciding where to source, manufacture, invest or price a product, the problem isn’t simply that tariffs are high.
It’s that the assumptions underneath today’s decisions can change remarkably quickly.
Walmart’s choice of one word tells us something
Walmart opened its first South African store at Clearwater Mall in November 2025, its second at Fourways and its third at East Point in Boksburg in February 2026.
Alongside that third opening came an announcement of another 21 stores across Gauteng, KwaZulu-Natal and the Western Cape.
But there was an important word in the announcement.
Proposed.
Not committed. Proposed.
For a business with Walmart’s resources, information and global retail experience, that choice of language matters.
The company clearly sees opportunity in South Africa. But seeing opportunity and committing capital against a long-range forecast are no longer necessarily the same thing.
Takealot provides another interesting example.
When Amazon launched its South African marketplace in 2024, the reasonable expectation was sustained pressure on the local incumbent’s margins.
Instead, Takealot reported its first full-year adjusted operating profit in roughly 15 years of trading: $11 million on approximately $1 billion of revenue, compared with a $13 million loss the previous year.
That happened during what its parent described as its first full financial year competing with Amazon.
It would be tempting to call that a victory.
I wouldn’t.
Naspers declined to reverse the R5.9 billion impairment previously recognised against the business, instead applying post-tax discount rates of between 17% and 21%, citing uncertainty in its own forecasts.
A company posts its first profit and its parent still won’t sign off on the projection.
That may be the most honest number in this story.
South African retailers may have been training for this for years
I’ve had the opportunity to work in retail and marketing in both the United States and South Africa, including at Best Buy in the US and Takealot and Clicks here at home.
One of the biggest differences isn’t simply scale.
It’s the assumptions businesses have historically been able to make.
American retail has been extraordinarily good at engineering efficiency: centralised buying, disciplined margins, sophisticated forecasting and supply chains calibrated to remove unnecessary cost.
Much of that works exceptionally well when next quarter looks reasonably similar to this one.
South African businesses have rarely had that luxury.
Electricity supply, currency movements, ports, policy changes and a large informal economy have forced businesses here to operate with a degree of uncertainty that would traditionally have been regarded as inefficiency elsewhere.
We carry contingencies. We improvise. We find another supplier. We change the route. We make the plan work when one of its assumptions disappears.
For years, many of these behaviours were treated as problems that would eventually be engineered out once the environment became more predictable.
I’m increasingly convinced we’ve been looking at some of them the wrong way.
What looked like inefficiency may, in some cases, actually be resilience.
An engineer designing for an unknown load builds tolerance into the structure. That tolerance costs money and may never be fully used.
But guessing the load is how bridges come down.
South African businesses have effectively been paying for that tolerance for years. The rest of the world is now discovering why it can be valuable.
But resilience has a limit
There is a danger in romanticising our ability to “make a plan”.
KwaZulu-Natal’s clothing manufacturing industry illustrates it.
Government inspections of Newcastle’s cut, make and trim factories during 2025 and 2026 exposed working conditions and wages that became national news. Retailers pulled work from some factories, yet compliant manufacturers approached to absorb those orders reportedly found themselves unable to produce the garments at the prices being offered.
One Cape Town manufacturer described costing a jacket and finding that her labour cost alone matched the retailer’s target price — before fabric, trims or margin.
That exposes the other side of adaptability.
A supply chain can absorb pressure for a surprisingly long time. Someone improvises. Someone accepts less margin. Someone finds a cheaper input.
Until eventually there is nowhere left for the cost to go.
Resilience is not the same thing as infinite capacity to absorb pressure.
And this is where the conversation becomes particularly important for marketers.
Stop trying to solve every cost problem with price
When input costs become unpredictable, retailers commonly reach for price.
The first response is discounting. It protects volume in the short term, but repeated discounting teaches customers that the advertised price isn’t really the price.
The second response is more subtle: increase the price and say nothing.
Customers notice.
What the business spends in that situation isn’t only affordability. It spends trust.
And trust takes much longer to rebuild than margin.
The more interesting question for retailers isn’t simply:
What should this product cost next month?
It is:
How quickly can our business respond if what we believe today turns out to be wrong?
That changes where businesses should invest.
The customer relationship becomes infrastructure
Price is one of the variables retailers have less control over than they would like.
The Rand moves. Freight moves. Tariffs move. Suppliers change their pricing. Regulation changes.
But retailers can control whether they know who their customers are.
They can build first-party customer data rather than allowing every transaction to disappear anonymously through the till.
They can create direct communication channels instead of paying an intermediary every time they need to reach the same customer.
They can understand what customers browse, what they buy, where those behaviours differ and how those patterns change.
And they can build enough trust that when something does change, they can explain why.
This is why I increasingly see customer data, CRM, loyalty and owned communication channels as more than marketing infrastructure.
They are resilience infrastructure.
A retailer with a meaningful direct relationship with its customers has options.
A retailer without one has media spend.
That distinction becomes increasingly important when conditions change quickly.
Measure adaptability, not just forecasts
Instead of spending all our energy predicting the Rand six months from now, measure something the organisation can actually improve.
Where does the business depend on a single supplier, currency, channel or customer?
Do we actually own our customer relationships?
How quickly can we identify a meaningful change in customer behaviour?
How long does that insight take to reach someone who can act on it?
How quickly can we change a supplier, reprice a range, communicate with customers or open a new sales channel?
Those are measurable capabilities.
And unlike a forecast, they become more valuable when the forecast is wrong.
Perhaps uncertainty isn’t the disadvantage we think it is
For a long time, South African businesses have looked at more predictable markets and seen what we lacked.
Stable infrastructure. Predictable policy. Stronger currencies. Efficient logistics. Greater scale.
Those advantages still matter.
But the world is becoming less predictable, not more.
And that changes the value of capabilities developed in markets like ours.
Naspers posted a profit and still wouldn’t sign off on its own forecast.
Walmart announced 21 stores and called them proposed.
Canada held almost every structural advantage at the table and still came away without certainty.
None of these organisations is short of information, expertise or sophisticated forecasting.
They simply can’t see far enough ahead to commit with complete confidence.
Neither can we.
Perhaps we should stop pretending that the objective is to get better at predicting everything that comes next.
The businesses that win the next decade may not be the ones that predict disruption most accurately.
They may simply be the ones that can change direction fastest when the prediction is wrong.
And if that’s where business is heading, South African companies may have more experience than we give ourselves credit for.
Yazeed Osman is a South African marketing and growth strategist and co-founder of USFL, a growth systems agency working with retailers to connect customer experience, data, technology and commercial growth. His career has included marketing and digital roles across Best Buy in the United States and Takealot, Clicks and News24 in South Africa.
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