Hon Rayi, the report was an investigation of the grocery retail market. It looked at two broad
areas. The one is the shopping malls, and the other is township shops - spaza shops, and so on. It tried to look at whether there are fair competition practices in both of those areas.
In the case of the shopping malls, there were a number of findings reached by the commission. It found, for example, that there are more than 2 000 shopping malls in South Africa, and that about half of the groceries bought in the country are bought via these shopping malls. It found that, in 70% of the shopping malls, they had exclusive lease agreements.
An exclusive lease agreement works like this. You set up a shopping mall. You get one of the big grocery supermarkets to be your anchor tenant. The anchor tenant then puts into the agreement that no other grocery store is allowed to operate in that mall. Now that's an exclusive lease. It is typically for 10 years. It often has clauses to roll it over for a further 10 years. They found examples of even 40 years.
Now, we regard that as deeply unfair. It limits competition. It leaves new entrants out of the market. Given the importance of shopping malls, it's something that we, from a competition point of view, cannot countenance.
The second finding was on trading conditions. They found that, in a number of cases, the larger players were able to impose unfair trading conditions on smaller players.
Regarding township enterprises, they examined very carefully why it is that many South African spaza shop owners don't perform so well, and why we find that a growing number of spaza shops are replaced either by foreign-born nationals, or alternatively by the big retailers - who are now increasingly coming into township, either with their own stores, or through franchise arrangements.
Time won't permit me to go into all the findings, but it is a comprehensive set of findings with lots of recommendations. I will be tabling the report in Parliament in due course, and we are now ... I'm going to appoint a facilitator to look at those recommendations. The report suggests a six-month window period for a voluntary agreement and, if there's not satisfactory voluntary agreement on the issues, we should use regulatory means to open up that market.