By: Natasha Archary

MultiChoice Group has reported a R911 million loss over the last 6-months of 2023, which is a massive decline from the R55 million profit over the same period last year.
Calvo Mawelo, MultiChoice Group CEO joins Kaya Biz to share what an uphill battle the entertainment business has to turn things around.
“The way we would like to describe the report is that we have really delivered a resilient operational performance, considering the challenges we’ve been facing in the South African market, and in Nigeria in particular where the currency has just gone down by 100%.
However, there are some positives that we can pick up from these results to ensure that we run a sustainable business.
If you look at the business from an organic basis, you’ll see that revenue has been up 4%, trading profit would have been up 18%, and our investment in Showmax has brought the free cashflow down by 40%.
But we are investing in the future of the business, all this headwind that we are facing is short-term gain for a long-term gain.
That’s what we believe is going to happen in the Nigerian market, we’ve been calling for the Nigerian government to push through policies that are going to make sure that the currency floats.
In the South African market, we really need to solve the loadshedding issue, and when that is done, we should be able to recover and grow going forward.”
In South Africa, the company’s subscriber growth was negatively impacted by the decision to end the short-term campaigns which were run in the previous year, to support customers during loadshedding.
This resulted in 311 000 non-revenue generating customers being removed from the 90-day active subscriber base.
Despite Mawela’s confidence that MultiChoice is the best content offering service in the country, the group’s 90-day active subscribers declined by 2% to 21.67 million. This is the first time this metric has gone down.
Listen to the conversation on Kaya Biz:
Also read: “This is severe” – 800 000 jobs have been lost in 2023 due to load shedding
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