The South African Broadcasting Corporation (SABC) announced on Wednesday that it has posted an after-tax profit of R383-million for the 2005/06 financial year. This is a 97% increase on the adjusted figure of R194-million for last year.
The public broadcaster also reported marked audience growth across most of its radio and television platforms in all official languages. Total revenue was up 17% year-on-year to R3,943-billion.
The SABC has four principal sources of funding — commercial (76% of revenue), television licences (19% of revenue), the government (1% of revenue) and other (4% of revenue).
Introducing the corporation’s new strategy of total citizen empowerment at the SABC’s results presentation, group CEO advocate Dali Mpofu said the new organisational structure involves seven pillars — people, operations, technology, funding, news and current affairs, governance and group CEO support.
The new strategy, he said, shifts from an inward-orientated, self- assessing stance to a broadcasting culture that will at all times be citizen focused.
“We will judge ourselves by the impact we have on all citizens,” he added. “The SABC has evolved to being a public broadcaster whose mandate and primary focus is to ensure that every citizen is empowered through our programming.”
Mpofu noted that there has been an appointment of a number of women at executive level at the SABC, adding that this presents “a subtle challenge to industry out there”.
He said that news and current affairs are of “crucial importance” as these can “make or break a public broadcaster”. The SABC currently delivers radio news and current affairs in 13 languages (this includes the !Xu and Khwe languages) and television news and current affairs in 11 languages.
Mpofu explained that the SABC has seen a fundamental increase in local content.
“SABC3 is currently running 43% local content — well above the Icasa [Independent Communications Authority of South Africa] quota of 35% — while our radio stations consistently exceed the minimum requirements for locally produced music, drama, news and current affairs programming.”
Mpofu concluded that the SABC’s contribution to the transformation of the economy is clear from the annual results as, in the past financial year, the corporation procured R2-billion-worth of products and services from black-owned businesses and small, medium and micro enterprises, and its capital expenditure programme for the current financial year will increase this by another R250-million.
Looking forward, Sonwabo Eddie Funde, chairperson of the SABC, noted that all eyes are on 2010 and that the SABC has been awarded broadcasting rights for both free-to-air and pay TV. He said the corporation will ensure that the world is “as captivated as South Africa by this event”.
He added that that the SABC will continue to consolidate its public service mandate, increase its provision of “compelling, informative, educative and entertaining programming,” and deliver even better performance in its financial and governance targets.
Chief operating officer Solly Mokoetle said at the presentation that despite the schedule changes that were necessitated by the new Icasa regulations, SABC TV continued to maintain high audience share levels, “both at prime time and for the total performance period”.
However, this was a period when the reach of SABC Radio Services declined from 81% to 80% of the national adult population, he said. The exception was for combined community radio, which recorded significant growth.
“SABC radio stations’ audience, however, continued to show strong loyalty to their brands. All SABC stations showed significant increase in their proportion of loyal audiences during the past year,” he said.
Robin Nicholson, chief financial officer at the SABC, said that revenue growth will show a consistent increase in the present year but that TV licences will slow or decline due to factors such as the petrol price and interest-rate hikes. He added that government funding of technology will continue while expenditure will increase in 2007 to fund the Soccer World Cup.
Turning to the outlook for 2007 mandate expansion, Nicholson noted that new licence conditions will have the following financial impact: increased investment in content on three TV channels will cost the corporation R82-million; the revenue impact of schedule and platform switches will cost R6-million; and increased news and current affairs programming will require R19,1-million. — I-Net Bridge