Vodacom is held 50% each by Telkom (TKG) and Vodafone in the UK, but Vodafone has recently put in a bid for a majority in Vodacom – something it has long been seeking – and Telkom is being sniffed at by Mvela and other consortium partners.<\/p>\n
Something has got to give if full value is to be unlocked, indicated Knott-Craig. <\/p>\n
He added that this did not mean the different components of the group did not "love each other", but that the changes would provide better direction.<\/p>\n
UK mobile phone operator Vodafone early last week made a non-binding offer for 12.5% of Telkom SA’s stake in Vodacom Group, according to media reports. <\/p>\n
Earlier Telkom said it had been approached by Vodafone to buy a portion of Telkom’s 50% stake in Vodacom. <\/p>\n
If the bid were successful Vodafone’s stake in Vodacom would increase to 62.5% from 50%. <\/p>\n
Separately Telkom also received a letter from a consortium interested in making an offer for all of Telkom, conditional on it spinning off its entire stake in Vodacom. <\/p>\n
The consortium is made up of South African politician-turned-businessman Tokyo Sexwale’s Mvelaphanda Holdings, New York-listed Och-Ziff Capital Management LLC (OZM) and other strategic backers.<\/p>\n
Vodacom on Monday reported another impressive performance, with revenue in the year ended March 2008 up 17.1% to 48.2 billion rand.<\/p>\n
The total number of SA customers increased by 7.9% to 24.8 million from 23.0 million in 2007 and the total number of customers was reported up 12.7% to 34 million.<\/p>\n
Knott-Craig tried to put the gainsayers at rest by saying that he felt SA was not a declining market.<\/p>\n
"There are a couple of years of good growth left in SA," he said.<\/p>\n
He added, though, that growth elsewhere in Africa had outpaced SA’s, with Lesotho the best performer, with profit from operations there up a whopping 64%.<\/p>\n
"Everything is going right in Lesotho right now," he said.<\/p>\n
Knott-Craig concluded by saying: "You cannot have enough broadband in this country or in any country."<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Cellular company Vodacom's chief executive officer, Alan Knott-Craig, said on Monday that the existing share structure "is not helping anyone" and that it is "time for a change" in the company structure.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_sma_x_autopost_status":"idle","_sma_x_autopost_error":"","_sma_x_post_id":"","_sma_facebook_post_id":"","_sma_instagram_post_id":"","_sma_threads_post_id":"","_sma_x_attempts":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4083","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-telecoms"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4083"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4083"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4083\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4083"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4083"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4083"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}