At the start of the Covid-19 crisis, it might have seemed that investing in hospital groups would be a good idea. Hospitals would be in the eye of the storm, right? But if you thought that, you would have been wrong.

Why is that? There are lots of reasons, but the most obvious is that Covid caused a delay in a lot of elective surgery, and that, it turns out, is where the hospital groups make a lot of their money.

All three of South Africa's (SA) hospital groups reported last week, and all showed incremental improvements. In some ways, now that the Covid crisis is on the wane, it may actually be the time to invest. All three of the groups, Mediclinic, Life Healthcare and Netcare, are solid businesses, all are innovating in marvelous ways, all are either expanding outside SA or going into international coalitions.

What SA's hospital groups are doing is very clever: the adoption of AI, the battle to make great services cheaper by pooling resources, the cross-border cooperation of research and development. It's all there, and it's magnificent.

But with the best will in the world, it's hard to claim they are the kinds of...