The Massmart acquisition may make sense to Wal-Mart, but it does little for consumer interests and competition in SA. Instead of allowing Wal-Mart to acquire a 51% stake in Massmart, it should instead have been encouraged or incentivised to establish – from the ground up – a chain of Wal-Mart stores to compete head-on against Massmart’s existing Game and Makro stores. That way, the hard-pressed SA consumer could have ended up with two competing groups of stores, instead of just a couple of brands marching in lock-step with one another price-wise. At the most, Wal-Mart should have been permitted to acquire one of the less dominant players in the industry, e.g. Stax. http://amplify.com/u/a1497g