14th cheque for everyone – SABC

Total revenues in the financial year to March 31 reached R3.314-bn, up 22% compared to the previous year’s performance. Operating expenditure increased by 8%, enabling the SABC to report a 141-fold increase on the R1.7-mn profit for the financial year to March 2004.

“These are the best results in the entire history of the SABC, and represent the fruits of an informed business strategy which has been successfully implemented by the SABC management team,” Eddie Funde, chairperson of the board said.

Funde said when the new board took over last year, it set goals for itself and the corporation when it came into office and that they can see progress being made.
“First, we set the task of ensuring innovative programming that is informative and entertaining. And, most importantly, we identified the challenge of ensuring that this programming was made available in all the official languages.

“If we look back now, we can say that excellent progress has been made in this regard. We have seen increased local content and local language use on most, if not all, the SABC platforms,” he said.

Funde said that the increase in local content had been matched up with an increase in audiences.

Both radio and television news audiences have increased dramatically over the past year. Current affairs radio audiences have grown by about 1.5 million listeners and all but one of the TV bulletins have recorded an increase in audiences.

“To us as a board, there is no doubt that tremendous progress has been made in meeting our objective of ensuring compelling, professional and authoritative news and current affairs programming. We believe the current drive into Africa, with the opening of several new bureaus, will only add to the quality of news programming available, and that we will continue to see increased audience levels,” he said. .
Funde said that the SABC continued to show financial stability, with positive financial results for the second year in a row.