The latest Rode Report indicated that the highest office rental costs are in Rosebank and not in Sandton.  Rosebank currently averages R245/m².  Melrose Arch is next at R230/m² and Sandton and the V&A Waterfront both average R220/m².  Rosebank’s current office vacancy is only 7% which is much less than the 18% vacancy in Sandton.  In other words, 18% of office space in Sandton is currently empty and not rented out which is something that must come as a surprise to most of us and indicating that Sandton’s popularity has declined dramatically.

It is very interesting that the area right next to our offices is the area that has become the most popular with the most expensive rentals as well as the lowest vacancy and that Sandton does not seem to be up to its previous glory.  If our offices, in Jan Smuts Avenue, were rented out at the Rosebank rate, the monthly rental for the offices would be R94,000 a month.

The Emmy Awards are hosted this Sunday and the amount of advertising that each show uses to promote itself is staggering.  Page after page is taken in edition after edition of the two main Hollywood newspapers, namely The Hollywood Reporter and Variety.  Magazines have had a feast of adverts for months including for a number of shows that you think cannot win.  In fact, the only show I have not seen advertising and a probable winner on some awards is in fact Game of Thrones. 

It is unlikely that our own Trevor Noah will win an Emmy Award this time, and John Olivier is the standout in that category, but I have seen so many adverts for TV shows I have not even seen or heard of.  Some of course come from Amazon Prime Video such as Marvellous which has 20 Emmy nominations.  When they see us from Netflix has 16 nominations, including for outstanding limited series and the other ones that are advertising a lot include:  Ozarks, Russian Doll and Succession.

I am amazed, with the problems we have with Eskom dragging down the credit rating of our country, that the government has not found a way to encourage solar power.  Most countries encourage this via tax incentives.  In other words, if you buy a Tesla in America you get a tax incentive for buying a Tesla.  It does not make the car that much cheaper, and those incentives have largely run out, but the deductions can be as much as $7,500 on a car which is off-set against your tax.  In other words, at the end of the year when you owe the government a certain amount of tax, you can deduct some money in respect of the car you bought. 

If you put solar power panels on your roof the same situation applies.  Countries that don’t have any power problems are giving these tax incentives and yet South Africa is not.  It would be one of the best ways to try and get everybody in the country sorting out their own electrical problems a bit.  An incentive that ultimately helps reduce the cost of solar would go a long way.  Installing a solar system is not cheap and the savings that you make in terms of not paying for electricity are so slow that the vast majority of people would never be interested in doing it, but if you implement attractive tax incentives, whereby it reduces the cost of installing solar, they might find a lot more businesses ready to help. What would that do?  Well, it would reduce the pressure on the grid on Eskom, it would reduce some of Eskom’s costs and it would reduce the pressure that it is putting on the debt rating of South Africa and the risk of a downgrade by ratings agencies.  This is such an obvious solution that I am astounded that it has not been looked at and considered by our Government a long time ago. 

It would be interesting to see what the next census shows South Africa’s population to be.  I did a bit of research on different websites and they estimate that South Africa’s current population is about 58,6 million which would make South Africa, by population, the 24th biggest country in the world.  There are a tremendous number of people that are born in South Africa everyday, approximately 3,200 births a day with about 1,500 deaths a day meaning that South Africa’s population grows every day.  That excludes the people that migrate to South Africa from Zimbabwe and various other countries. 

It becomes even more important in the future, particularly with a large younger population at the moment, for the jobs market to grow because otherwise the unemployment rate is going to increase and there will be a lot of very unhappy people.  We see that in the protest at the moment where residents for example in Plettenberg Bay attacked police with bricks and stones forcing the police to get out of their cars and run away and the various Municipal protests we see all the time.  To a large extent this relates to unemployment and we need to plan for a lot more people entering the jobs market now and in the next 20 years and there would need to be jobs for them to do. 

With September being a traditional time when new iPhones are released, rumours are beginning to speculate on all the websites as to what this year’s new iPhone is going to include.  In recent years they have not really got that much more advanced and I have been disappointed, in particular with the improvements on the cameras. 

The rumours at the moment is that the next iPhone, which is allegedly going to be called iPhone 11, is going to have a triple camera array.  In other words, there will be three lenses on the back of the camera and one of them is going to give you an ultra-wide angle.  Allegedly there will be a laser-aided 3D camera in the 2020 models, but that is not going to come out now.  Putting in 3 lenses on the back of an iPhone will probably not look beautiful, but if any company can pull if off, it is Apple, but I don’t think that the current two lens array on the current phone is that beautiful in any event.  There are some suggestions that iPhone will not produce a 5G phone this year and if that is the case that is a mistake with 5G beginning to roll out in America and around the world, although obviously it is very early days still.