Let’s stop pretending a "R0 salary" is an act of heroic sacrifice. It’s a hedge fund manager flogging a tired operational horse to inflate his own equity payout, while PR pieces ignore what’s actually happening on the ground.
1. He isn’t working for free, he’s working for his own stake. Summerton and his Milkwood fund hold roughly 5% of iOCO, mostly accumulated when the stock traded around R1 to R3. At ~R4 a share, that stake is worth over R100 million. That dwarfs any cash salary he gave up or the R5m conditional share grant. He isn't a benevolent CEO working for charity, he's a major shareholder driving operational cuts to pump his own equity value.
2. Flogging the operational horse instead of growing the business. Look at where the "R357m profit" actually came from. Total revenue was practically flat (up 2.7% to R5.73bn), while core IT services revenue, the actual engine of the business, fell 6.6% to R3.9bn. The 39% profit jump didn't come from winning customers, it came from stripping R288 million (11%) out of the wage bill. They are chopping 3-person engineering teams down to 2, stripping leave coverage, and riding remaining staff into the ground to manufacture profit margins.
3. Engineering EPS via buybacks. Instead of reinvesting in staff or paying dividends, iOCO spent R69 million buying back 2.6% of its own stock. By destroying those shares, earnings per share (EPS) automatically increase without requiring a single cent of new organic revenue. It’s financial engineering designed to hit share price targets.
4. The cash flow collapse nobody mentions. While headlines celebrate a "R357m profit," audited net cash from operating activities dropped 44% to R239m. You can only cut a wage bill so many times before the operational horse collapses under SLA breaches, burnout, and client churn.
The Bottom Line: Paying down debt after the EOH mess was necessary, but this "R0 CEO turnaround" angle is pure spin. You cannot cost cut your way to long term tech growth once you've flogged the operational core to the bone.
