Telkom have money to burn

Now even sports journalists are now using their columns to express unhappiness with Telkom! It's a reflection of the utter desperation in this country!

http://sport.iafrica.com/columns/dan_world/268477.htm

Until Monday, Telkom’s most generous streak of employment creation involved stringing up copper wire around the country between telephone poles, allowing Zimbabweans to carefully remove it, sell it, and thus make an honest living in between dodging immigration and Nigerian landlords. But come Monday night, all that changed, as Telkom’s chief means of occupational support turned to football, and the cheerful tossing of R14.2-million in the general direction of the beautiful game.

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Article is about the exceptional amounts of money that Telkom is throwing into soccer- "R4-million for winning four matches, in less than two months, all expenses paid…...R450 000 to lose a game....".

People, this is OUR money!!!! This is not any kind of 'sccer development' they are talking about here, this is, as so often seems to be the case with Telkom, just another example of Telkom paying the way of those who are already rich!

The article also hints that Telkom is making grabs at WorldCup2010 and all the delicious deals that may be involved around it....

But R14.2-million for a 16-team knock-out tournament simply doesn’t make sense — not in a country where R14.2-million could do a hell of a lot for a hell of a lot of people.

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Whilst the amount of money being spoken of here is large in the context of local soccer, it is not large in the context of the amount of profit Telkom makes. By my calculations, this R14 million represents just 82 minutes of net profit for Telkom. (I ask someone to double check my figures for me - Telkom made a net profit of R9.3 billion in the last financial year - one can work it out from that). This R14 million is just a drop in their ocean Dan, it's just 82 minutes at the office....

No doubt this comes off the bottom line as an expense, so the tax man is paying for it. The public get shafted twice.

Anyone know how much telkom (we) throw at golf per annum?

Telkodemonopolies & guavamint [the beast's single largest shareholder] know that if the masses of voters realised just how badly Telkodemonopolies continues to drag SA's economy down & prevent job creation, then there would be hell to pay, so Telkodemonopolies' strategy is to put money in Soccer instead of copper lines - this keeps Soccer fans blissfully unaware of how beastly & evil Telkodemonopolies is and how guavamint has let the voters down.

How have their shareholders reacted?
The statement "money to burn" hardly holds true. And money that a public company might have belongs to the shareholders, who often react badly to the burning of their money

Sponsorship comes out of their marketing budget. Now that they have competition (kinda) they actually have a reason to have one.