MARC HASENFUSS: What goes up ...

I waited for the SpaceX IPO with the same anticipation I am reserving for the new Rolling Stones album (due next month). I don’t think (and please feel free to change my mind) that the Stones have made a great album since Some Girls in the late 1970s … so over the years my enthusiasm for new works by the Glimmer Twins has gradually faded.

Other than She’s So Cold, Start Me Up and Saint of Me, there are not too many other post-1980s Stones numbers on my playlist. SpaceX, I watched from afar, knowing full well the hazards of hyped IPOs — and especially in the exuberant “new frontiers” environment.

That said, the listing of SpaceX was rather fun … almost surreal. One small step for excitable retail investors, one giant step for investment professionals. I particularly enjoyed the vastly contrasting cosmic babble from pessimistic doomsayers and those floating in the optimistic orbit.

The most compelling, though not entirely convincing (yet) cautionary blast on X was a comparison between Cisco — the poster stock of the late-1990s tech boom — and SpaceX. The post reminded us that Cisco was once the backbone of the internet, “the most valuable company on earth”. Then things came tumbling down after the tech bubble burst. Cisco, though, recovered, and remains one of the tech icons.

SpaceX, by the same token, is the backbone of the space and AI age. The common theme would be overvaluation. Whether SpaceX is due a tumble in the short term, after the initial investment euphoria is replaced by cash flow and capital expenditure realities, is not a call I would want to make. These markets are crazy.

I did see an intriguing note from Oppenheimer Research, suggesting SpaceX will disrupt the $1.6-trillion communications industry, “the only major revenue to capture immediately”. Oppenheimer reckons if SpaceX grabs a majority of the global $500bn broadband market, and potentially the mobile service and handset markets, it would give the group dominance over the network/cloud with “tollbooth economics”.

Let’s see how this all gets priced in over the next few weeks.

Getting back to earth (so to speak), agribusiness Crookes Brothers delivered a hectic trading update for the year to end-March with a basic loss of between R16.16 a share and R17.05 a share pencilled in.

Headline earnings should come in between 2.35c and 27.85c a share, down by between 93% and 99% on the previous financial year.

I don’t think the headline number is entirely unexpected, considering the bitter period for the local sugar sector. The basic earnings loss will be more galling, with Crookes flagging a hefty R256m impairment for its macadamia segment “due to underperformance”. The macadamia sector was one of the more promising thrusts to diversify Crookes away from its traditional sugar core, which makes developments hard to digest. The group never got far with its deciduous fruit ambitions either.

The results due for release next week will, I’m sure, still show a dominant sugarcane centre. With the trading update indicating the property sales from its development on Renishaw farm slowing, the latest NAV number at Crookes will be important to assess. At the close of the 2025 financial year, Crookes had a pretty hard NAV of close to R73 a share. With the share down by a quarter over a year to R20 and limited tradeability, surely an idea to pitch a buyout offer to minority shareholders must be germinating?

Then, a delightful surprise from specialist mining services business Master Drilling (the subject of a critical article in the FM just last month). Readers might remember that the group somewhat controversially deferred a decision on a dividend for the year to end-December 2025 — citing the importance of maintaining financial flexibility during uncertain times.

Thankfully, the Master Drilling board decided that the oil price spike and other geopolitical ructions did not have a material impact on the group’s operations, so there would be no postponements or cancellations of key projects. These happy operational circumstances prompted a special dividend of 40c a share, cleverly declared on the same day as Master Drilling hosted its AGM.

I suspect more than a few Reinet shareholders might have observed developments at Master Drilling. Here’s hoping, for all of us, that Reinet might deem the prevailing investment environment appropriate to return some of its arguably excessive cash heap.

Speaking of special distributions, Trematon Capital’s value-unlock exercise advanced another big step with the sale of Generation Education to one of Old Mutual’s specialised investment vehicles. The R172m price tag is close enough to the most recent stated value for shareholders not to kick up a monumental fuss. The commitment to return the net proceeds to shareholders “in due course” should placate those who initially had high hopes for Generation.

Lastly, I was quite taken aback to see that Ashley Bell would step down as Bell Equipment CEO. He came across very well at the recent AGM. The chair, Gary Bell, said Ashley had done a fantastic job during a challenging period and I could not find too many shareholders last week who disagreed. Ashley remains as a nonexecutive, with the CEO mantle going to Izak van Niekerk, an experienced outsider with previous insider knowledge at Bell. The market took this in its stride, with Bell’s share price unchanged.

Sentiment could easily have been altered by an executive change at a delicate point in the business cycle, coupled with ongoing musings about a possible buyout. But it was not.