Author: Hilton Tarrant

Not enough attention is paid to the extent to which Vodacom, the country’s largest mobile operator, leverages resources from (and executes the global strategy of) parent Vodafone.

First National Bank’s new First Business Zero Account, with no monthly fees, has made competitors sit up and take notice.

While the immediate causes of the generation crisis at Eskom are well known, the emergency it found itself in this week has been some time coming.

The astonishing things is that shareholders were asked to approve the new scheme – and did – without knowing what the performance condition was.

Shareholders in MultiChoice, which was unbundled from Naspers on 4 March, rejected the group’s executive pay at Thursday’s AGM.

Three investment banks – Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan and Morgan Stanley – will be paid €7.2-million each for their roles as lead financial advisors in Naspers’s listing of Prosus in Amsterdam.

The annual double-digit increases in the price of electricity have sent household energy bills skyrocketing. But there are simple changes that households can make to reduce their consumption and therefore their electricity bills.

Eskom has only managed to meet peak demand with its own fleet on 49 of the 106 days between the most recent instance of load shedding on 23 March, and 7 July.

A new fixed surcharge of R200/month means that City of Johannesburg residents who use prepaid electricity will see actual increases of up to 66% in the cost of power from this month.

Analysts have long criticised Telkom since its entry into the mobile market in October 2010, which hasn’t come cheap. But it’s become the company’s saving grace.