Pepkor dominates TFG, Truworths, and Mr Price

PressPulse’s latest media sentiment report showed that Pepkor received much better coverage than The Foschini Group (TFG), Truworths, and Mr Price.

Pepkor is a South African retail and fintech powerhouse that dominates the value segment of the market.

It serves the low-end market in South Africa with a range of affordable products, including phones, clothing, and furniture.

The company has numerous well-known retail brands, including Pep, Ackermans, Tekkie Town, Refinery, Dunns, and Legit.

What makes Pepkor unique is that they don’t just sell products – they’ve built a digital and financial ecosystem around their physical stores.

It includes Flash, a B2B platform used by over 170,000 informal traders, PAXI, a parcel delivery service, and connectivity.

Pepkor consistently delivers strong financial results, which include record-breaking annual results for the 2025 financial year.

Its latest results for the quarter ended 31 December 2025 showed group revenue increased by 12.9% to R29.9 billion.

Momentum continued into January 2026 with 12.3% sales growth during the critical back-to-school period.

This strong performance amidst South Africa’s poor economic growth translated into good media coverage.

Its competitors, like TFG, Truworths, and Mr Price, did not enjoy the same positive coverage in recent months. This was partly self-inflicted.

Mr Price’s planned acquisition of NKD Group for approximately R9.7 billion sparked an immediate and severe backlash from the market and shareholders.

Despite this backlash, Mr Price’s management is pushing ahead with the deal, causing even more unhappiness and negative reports.

TFG, in turn, suffered from poor sales growth and declining headline earnings per share.

There was a perceived lack of transparency from CEO Anthony Thunström, who promised the market much better results.

Pepkor dominates TFG, Truworths, and Mr Price

PressPulse’s latest media sentiment report showed that Pepkor received much better media coverage than other large clothing retailers.

PressPulse is an online media-sentiment tracking platform that developed a custom artificial intelligence system for measuring sentiment.

It tracks South Africa’s top business publications and measures companies’ success in achieving positive exposure in them.

The sentiment ranking is based on the number of positive, neutral, or negative articles and the reach and influence of the publication where they are published.

Each company is assigned a sentiment score. A positive score indicates overall positive exposure, while a negative score indicates negative exposure.

The score’s size indicates the impact of the exposure. A big positive score, for example, shows that a company enjoyed highly impactful positive exposure.

Press Pulse’s sentiment analysis showed that Pepkor received a positive media sentiment score of 75, much higher than its competitors.

TFG was second with a positive score of 6, followed by Truworths with a negative score of 8 and Mr Price with a negative score of 17.

The chart below shows the media sentiment scores of South Africa’s large clothing retailers over the last three months.