Last week's purchase of the Rolling Rock beer brand by Anheuser-Busch has an interesting historical twist.
Anheuser-Busch, the US's largest brewer, said on Friday it had bought the Rolling Rock beer brands from InBev for $82 million (R533 million).
Rolling Rock was once owned by SA Breweries (SAB), which was responsible for the revival of the brand in the 1980s.
SAB bought Rolling Rock in 1983 as part of the company's first investment outside southern Africa. SAB kicked off that expansion with the soft drinks and fruit juices businesses, which were later followed by Rolling Rock.
Rolling Rock, a beer brand first brewed in 1939, had been doing badly when SAB bought it. The then South African company revived Rolling Rock by pumping more money behind its marketing.
However, in the brand's success lay the seeds of SAB's short-lived investment in the US.
The successful revival of Rolling Rock began attracting attention in the Pennsylvania area and SAB feared that the attention might result in the discovery of the brand's South African ownership. The discovery of the brand's parentage could have been disastrous for SAB because of the sanctions campaign against South Africa.
With the sanctions campaign spotlight on Rolling Rock, the brand risked a boycott by beer drinkers and SAB would also have faced the prospect of being forced to sell Rolling Rock for a song.
So in 1987 SAB quietly sold Rolling Rock and its other investments in the US.
Labatt USA, a subsidiary of the Canadian brewer that was acquired by Interbrew in 1995, bought Rolling Rock and its brewing plant in Latrobe, Pennsylvania.
SAB used the proceeds to buy a brewery in the Canary Islands and to make investments in the fruit juice industry in the UK.
The foray into the Canary Islands was SAB's first major long-lasting investment outside the African continent. As the South African political environment moved towards normality, SAB ventured into other countries.
In 2002 SAB bought Miller Brewing, the US's second-biggest brewer after Anheuser-Busch, and changed its name to SABMiller. As SABMiller, it now has beer brewing operations in North America, Africa, Europe, Asia and Latin America.
So there is a historical message in a beer bottle after all.
The recent controversy over the sale by Metallon Ventures of its 25 percent shareholding in this construction company is the fault of Bouygues Travaux Publics.
Bouygues sold its controlling shareholding in Basil Read to Metallon and Amabubesi Investments. Metallon Ventures is owned by Mzi Khumalo and Amabubesi is chaired by Bulelani Ngcuka.
From the very beginning of its talks with Metallon and Amabubesi, the French company knew that Khumalo did not see himself as a black economic empowerment (BEE) investor.
But Bouygues, which retains an 18.7 percent shareholding in Basil Read, continued to announce the deal as a BEE transaction. This was misleading. In reality, only the Amabubesi leg of the deal should have been labelled a BEE transaction. Had this been done, it would have given investors a more accurate picture of what was happening.
Based on the way the deal was presented to the investing public, Basil Read had become a black enterprise, a term which, under the department of trade and industry's BEE scorecard, means a company is 50.1 percent owned by black people.
Basil Read was, for a while at least, the only company on the JSE with that status. None of Basil Read's peers in the construction industry can claim that pedigree.
However, even at 36 percent black ownership, Basil Read is still ahead of its peers.
It is no surprise then that investors drove Basil Read's share price from 82c last year to a high of R7.48. Bouygues had been economical with the truth.
The six-year marriage between the country's third-largest cellular operator and Vodacom, the biggest, seems to be on the rocks.
When Cell C launched its business, it sought Vodacom's assistance by piggybacking on its national network.
Over the years Cell C has built its own network and now about 81 percent of the traffic is carried on its own network.
Last Friday, Vodacom's network crashed, for the second time in less than two months, for about three hours. The failure resulted in 20 million Vodacom subscribers being unable to make or receive calls. Vodacom investigated where the problem came from and identified Cell C as the culprit, but the youngest operator refused to be the scapegoat.
Both companies attacked each other through the media, with Cell C denying that it should be held responsible for the three-hour crash. Vodacom went on to say that it was working on the problem together with Cell C's engineers.
Cell C denied that its engineers were assisting in returning roaming services to Cell C subscribers roaming on Vodacom's network.
"The problems experienced were on Vodacom's network and our understanding is that these were rectified by Vodacom's engineers fixing their own network problems. The problems had nothing to do with Cell C's network and so were not required to be addressed by our engineers," Cell C said.
It is understandable that every relationship goes through a dip. But we wonder how the relationship between the two parties is now that the network has been fixed? Have they kissed and made up?
Or should Cell C prepare to pay more as a punishment for allegedly causing the network failure?
Cell C's best bet is to speed up investment in its own network, although that might take a while.