BizNews Edge: Piet Viljoen says smart money is buying South Africa

Two big JSE companies had received buyout offers in under a month, one of them listed for 62 years, and value investor Piet Viljoen said both deals undervalued the businesses on a ten-year view. He also expected most shareholders to take the money anyway. A day after Sanlam's R505-a-share offer for the rest of Santam, and weeks after India's Solar Industries moved on Omnia, Viljoen told Alec Hogg why insiders and foreign buyers were seeing value that local investors kept missing, and what the delisting wave said about where the market sat in its cycle. He took on the Reg 28 offshore debate, BEE and the 4 November elections, and held his ground when Alec challenged him on MK, before turning to Wall Street, where he argued that a handful of AI stocks were masking real damage beneath record highs as US bond yields climbed to levels last seen in 2002.