Shareholders in MultiChoice, which was unbundled from Naspers on 4 March, rejected the group’s executive pay at Thursday’s AGM.
The Information Communication Technology Union will lead its members at MultiChoice South Africa out on strike on Friday to protest job cuts at the pay-television operator.
MultiChoice Group executive chairman Imtiaz Patel received almost $1.5-million (about R21.4-million at the time of writing) in base salary, bonuses, pension and short-term incentives in the 2019 financial year.
A jobs bloodbath is looming at pay-television operator MultiChoice Group, which said on Friday it will enter into a “consultation process” with 2 194 of its employees as part of a “strategic realignment of its customer service delivery model”.
Icasa has decided to conduct an inquiry into the so-called “must-carry regulations”, which allow MultiChoice and other pay-television operators to carry the SABC public service channels at no cost.
MultiChoice Group made its market debut in Johannesburg on Wednesday morning as a JSE Top40 company with a market capitalisation of about R44-billion shortly after 9am.
The pay-television broadcaster, which will list on the JSE later this month, has revealed all the price adjustments to its DStv bouquets, which will take effect on 1 April 2019.
MultiChoice won’t hike the price of DStv Premium in 2019, reflecting the pressure the pay-television broadcaster is under at the top end of the market.
MultiChoice will carry losses incurred by Showmax in the “medium term”, but the goal is eventually for the streaming television service to turn a profit once broadband infrastructure in South Africa and the rest of the continent has been built out further to support it.
MultiChoice Africa Group, which will list on the JSE next month, expects to pay executive chairman Imtiaz Patel R22.2-million for the year ended 31 March 2019, up from R19.7-million in the 2018 financial year.