COMPANY NEWS IN BRIEF

Sasol outage shuts oil refineries Sasol, South Africa’s largest fuel producer, declared force majeure on the supply of petroleum products due to delays in deliveries of crude to the Natref refinery it owns with TotalEnergies, leaving just a fraction of the country’s fuel-production capacity still operational.Natref, a 108 000 barrel-a-day plant, was forced to shut after the late oil shipments, the company said in a statement. “Sasol Oil will not be in a position to fully meet its commitments on the supply of all petroleum products from July 2022,” the firm said.The shutdown means the whole of South Africa’s oil-refinery fleet is out of action after a string of other facilities suspended production over the past two years. As a result, the country’s monthly petroleum product imports are set to as much as triple by next year from pre-pandemic levels, energy consultant Citac said in a May report.Only Sasol’s synthetic fuel operations, which use coal as a feedstock, remain fully operational, making up about a fifth of nationwide capacity.A fire at the Engen oil refinery, which will be converted into a terminal, and an explosion at Glencore’s Cape Town refinery, have rapidly curbed capacity. -Fin24Starbucks may sell its UK operationsStarbucks has asked its adviser Houlihan Lokey to assess interest for its UK operations, the Times reported Saturday.The coffee chain continues to “evaluate strategic options” for its company-owned international operations, the newspaper reported, without specifying how it obtained the information. A Starbucks spokesperson told Bloomberg it “is not in a formal sale process for the company’s UK business.The UK is Starbucks’ largest market in Europe, the Middle East and Africa. As of last year, it had 1 000 stores in Britain, with 297 company-owned and 703 run by licensees, the company said in a financial report for the fiscal year ending in October 2021. Total revenue was £328 million (R3.7 billion) for the fiscal year, and Starbucks UK Coffee had repaid in full a £25 million loan from its parent company to offset losses from reduced sales during the first months of the coronavirus pandemic, it said. While the coffee chain experienced a rebound in revenue after Covid-19 lockdowns eased in the UK, it said the financial performance of company-owned stores had not recovered to pre-pandemic levels. Office, travel and inner-city stores had lagged other locations. Starbucks opened 14 new company stores during fiscal year 2021 and closed five, it said.Earlier this year, market researcher Allegra Group said coffee chains in the UK will take four years to recover from the Covid slump. -Fin24New acting CCO for SAASouth African Airways&#039; (SAA) acting chief commercial officer (CCO) has decided to call it quits, and is not renewing his contract.Tebogo Tsimane will take over the position from Simon Newton-Smith, SAA confirmed on Thursday afternoon.Newton-Smith will leave the airline at the end of August. According to SAA, Tsimane, "has several years of experience in senior roles within the commercial and operational environment at SAA".In the view of SAA&#039;s interim chair and CEO, Professor John Lamola, Tsimane has "an exceptional understanding of the complexities of the new aviation operating environment and knows exactly what SAA needs to do to remain successful and profitable".At the same time, Lamola lauded Newton-Smith for the much needed stability he brought to SAA&#039;s commercial operation during his year as acting CCO.-Fin24Twitter down for thousands of users globallyTwitter was down for thousands of users across the globe, its first such outage since February, according to outage tracking website Downdetector.com.There were more than 50,000 incidents of people reporting issues with Twitter in the United States, according to the website. Users in other countries including the United Kingdom, Mexico, Brazil and Italy also reported issues.The outage comes days after Twitter sued Elon Musk for violating his $44 billion deal to buy the company and asked a Delaware court to order the world&#039;s richest person to complete the takeover.The outage began around 8:00 ET and prevented users from logging into the micro-blogging site on desktops and mobile phones.It was not clear what caused the outage. Users were getting an error message: "Tweets aren&#039;t loading right now." Twitter did not immediately respond to a request for comment, but its status dashboard indicated that all systems were operational. -Fin24

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