Best news from the South African Post Office in 13 years
The South African Post Office (SAPO) presented an overview of its financial performance for 2025/26 in Parliament on Wednesday, 10 June 2026, revealing a net loss of R71 million.
That reflected a significant improvement over the R514 million net loss it reported in the 2024/25 financial year. It is also the lowest loss since its 2012/13 financial year.
“The net loss position was R71 million compared to the prior net loss of R514 million,” said Lenny Govender, general manager for cost and accounting at SAPO.
“In terms of the net loss, this is one of the years that SAPO has recorded the lowest net loss if you look at the last five to six years.”
The state-owned entity recorded revenue of R1.54 billion, which grew by R2 million year-on-year, while its expenses declined by R168 million year-on-year to R2.52 billion.
Reduced expenses were driven by staff costs declining by R143 million year-on-year, as SAPO reduced its headcount from 5,892 in March 2025 to 5,658 in March 2026.
It reported non-operating income of R907 million, including a R309 million injection from the Temporary Employer-Employee Relief Scheme and a R498 million subsidy to fund universal service obligations.
The Post Office said its operations during the reporting period continued under austerity measures that limited maintenance and capital expenditure opportunities.
“The primary focus has been on revenue generation and cost management,” it said, adding that this contributed to the reduced net loss.
The Post Office last reported a true profit in the 2011/12 financial year and has since faced financial decline. In recent years, the losses have frequently been in the billions of rand.
In 2020/21, it reported revenue of R2.93 billion and a net loss of R2.33 billion. In 2021/22, it generated revenue of R3.03 billion and a net loss of R2.18 billion.
In 2022/23, revenue was R2.33 billion while the loss declined marginally to R2.16 billion. The 2023/24 financial year’s profit was an anomaly.
The Post Office generated revenue of R1.63 billion and reported a net profit of R5.30 billion. However, this was not as a result of operational improvements.
Declining finances and entering business rescue
The reported profit came after the Post Office entered business rescue, and its creditors agreed to a compromise that wrote off 88% of the amounts the entity owed to them.
This resulted in a R7.4 billion write-back of creditor debt on its income statement for the 2023/24 financial year.
The Post Office’s latest published results for the 2024/25 financial year reported revenue of R1.20 billion and a net loss of R117 million.
That amount appears to have been adjusted following the report, as the Post Office’s presentation before Parliament showed a net loss of R514 million for the period.
The state-owned entity entered business rescue in July 2023, and practitioners Anoosh Rooplal and Juanito Damons were selected to manage the process.
Communications minister Solly Malatsi recently revealed that the business rescue process had cost R321 million since it commenced.
Included in this cost was an amount of R237.53 million for supporting staff in the business rescue process and R13.72 million in business rescue practitioner fees.
Former Post Office CEO Mark Barnes criticised the costs, saying the state entity could have paid the salaries of numerous CEOs working simultaneously for less.
“They could’ve employed 27 CEOs, all working there full time for the past three years, for less. Stop this,” he said.
His assessment assumed that each CEO would have been paid R3.96 million annually, which is roughly what the last CEO was paid in 2022.
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