Telkom chief executive Sizwe Nxasana told MPs on Friday that his company “is constantly responding” to the demands for the lowering of the costs of doing business — and further announcements can be expected “in the future”.
Briefing the National Assembly communications portfolio committee, Nxasana made the comments in the context of what he called market liberalisation in the telecommunications sector.
He remarked that this is “a positive development” — although he did not mention specifically competition from the envisaged second national operator or from voice over internet protocol, which is expected to reduce massively the call costs of communicating, particularly by businesses.
He said Telkom has already recently reduced the cost of long-distance and international calls — the latter by an average of about 28% — while local calls have only increased by 2,1c per minute.
Noting that Telkom has been voted by Empowerdex and the Financial Mail for the second successive year as the company that has made the most progress in terms of black economic empowerment (BEE), he said that BEE procurement spending now makes up 57,8% of all purchases.
This translates into R4,6-billion in actual value of a total of R7,9-billion. Total spending on BEE suppliers since 1997 stands at about R26-billion.
At the same time, the company has made great advances as far as racial representivity is concerned. Nine of the 11 board members are black, including three black women. This amounts to 82% black representation. Of top management, 69% are black — 19 black people, including five black women.
At the lower level of supervisors in the company, 41% are now black compared with just 4% in 1994, while at operational level, black representation is at 62% compared with 21% in 1994, at the advent of democracy.
Women now represent 26,7% of the total workforce, and the technical development programme is “aimed at females and blacks”. Total training and development spending was R390-million in 2004 — “more than 1% of company revenue”.
Nxasana noted that “a one-year moratorium” applies to all retrenchments after negotiations took with three trade unions involved at Telkom — Solidarity, the Communication Workers’ Union and the South African Communication Union.
Telkom had planned to downscale its structures by 7 600 jobs over three years, a process that was to have entailed natural attrition but also redeployment and voluntary and forced severance packages. — I-Net Bridge