Hey crew, here’s to another week of cutting through the noise and focusing on what actually moves financial minds forward.

No buzzwords, just the stuff affecting wallets, business & the economy:

🖐️ Fab Five: Abay Flows To The Capital Markets

👾 AI Prompts For Personal Finance

🍕 Pizza Hut is Failing, Somebody Forgot to Tell Ethiopia

Here’s to the 114th edition

Let’s dive in.

What’s the difference between ninjas and listed companies?

Apparently…not much!

They both tip toe in silence before making a move, both have hidden identities while they conjure up their next move and there’s always a sense that there’s another one coming…

And talk about ringing the bell🔔 jeez!

Either that thing is made out of cotton or the walls of the ESX trading floor room are suppa thick but it seems that the loud gong noise doesn’t leave the building.

Well, this drama is warranted cause news hit that Abay Bank is the new entrant tapping its shoes to the dance floor.

Ticker ABAYB (Why not just ‘ABAY’? Seems like a missed opportunity…)

Anyways, numbers.

Listed shares: 9,657,286
Share Price: 1849 ETB (as of June 28)
Last recorded profit: 1,883,616,000 ETB
Branches: 546
Number of BICs used on a daily: Plenty

Abay was certainly not on anyone’s bingo card, at least not now.

It joins the other four party-goers awkwardly standing in the background, quietly hoping that the market gives them love while the music changes between classical and rock.

Maybe we should fire the DJ.

Regardless, Ethiopians are still learning about going public, the meaning of brokerage accounts and the simple act of opening their trading app to see how their investment is doing.

Number 5 certainly pushes the bar.

Time to pay attention now.

Question is, who’s next?

How Does This Affect Me? Well Abay’s investment prospectus is online (don’t fall asleep, maybe ask your friendly AI model to extract the main points - this is certainly not financial advice!).

Truth is, more companies on the stock exchange builds confidence amongst investors and creates volatility in the market.

Meaning interest rises, cash changes hands and accounts get debited.

If you already own a brokerage account and have been listening to our banter filled educational content (you astute student you) then you’ll know that this is progress.

As always, do your due diligence before putting your boat in the river (Proud of that pun 😉). Buying a stock is just one click away…

If your last AI prompt was “What’s the difference between an orange and a mandarin?”, then you really need to reevaluate your life choices.

AI has opened up so many possibilities, same as the internet did in the 1990s.

From photoshopping ourselves in movie scenes to solving difficult math problems, the AI use cases are immense and some people have found clever ways to get their life to be more productive.

Ask yourself, if AI can filter, structure and organize a tailor made answer, what prevents it from giving you smart money advice?

To seek some truth for your personal finance needs, try some of these prompts:

What the AI should prepare: a clear and concise step by step guide showing what career decisions to take, where to save, where to go all in

What the AI should prepare: a few short paragraphs in an email format, possible alternative phrasing if there’s any follow up

What the AI should prepare: a list broken down into categories (Needs, Wants, Nice to haves) with item prices and justification for those picks. Included is a guide in case there’s money left over from the allocated budget.

AI is here to stay.

Gone are the days when it was a playground for silly inquiries.

It can now give you the power to create something out of nothing, equip you with knowledge and strategy.

So instead of asking ChatGPT if your pet’s new habit of licking the window is linked to heartbreak, maybe you can give it a bit of a grown up task 😉

$2.7B. 

That’s the amount that the Pizza Hut brand is being sold for right now.

After years of falling sales and stagnating growth, Pizza Hut has come to the reality that no matter how you slice it (sorry), the pieces don't fall in place any more.

Yum Brands, the publicly traded company that owns Taco Bell, a fast food style Mexican cuisine restaurant and KFC, America’s chicken bucket provider, has decided that it needed to part ways.

Immediately attracting the eye of Private Equity Firms.

This is not new actually, Private Equity looks for failing businesses, strips the non-essentials, beefs up operations, borrows heavily (ወገብ የሚቆርት ዕዳ!) and then turns around and sells it to the next suitor.

Some brands need this in Ethiopia honestly, they never die but they live a very miserable and long life, lagging behind the competition and defiant to not accept their demise…👀 

It’s the emotional equivalent of breaking up with someone but somehow staying in the spare bedroom forever.

The US’ love affair with Pizza Hut might be over but the rest of the world is certainly not buying it. 

Its entry into the Ethiopian market was not met with huge fanfare but almost 10 years on, it looks like it’s enjoying the Addis weather.

Pizza Hut is expanding through its licensee partner Belayab Foods, opening up locations and filling seats with more butts than ever.

It is one of the few foreign brands to successfully launch and extend its reach in a market that is traditionally been difficult to set up in let alone grow a network.

Pizza Hut messed up in its parent market by getting to trends late, delaying innovations and living too much in the past.

But Ethiopia knows the Pizza Hut of 2017, fresh look, consistent food and open in most places in Addis.

Yet, getting a sizeable return on an international investment takes years, what usually sustains that gamble is a good cash cow activity on home soil, activity that stalled in Pizza Hut’s case.

Time will tell what happens to Ethiopia’s operations once the new owners sit in the driver’s seat…