Nasper H1 Results with CEO Koos Bekker

I think South Africa is now no longer even one of the top three internet destinations in Africa, and it's all self-inflicted wounds. I think the basic reason is that the government is the main investor in Telecom, and consequently a lot of policies were shaped to maintain the Telecom position, and it's cost the country dearly. So if you're an eye surgeon and you don't have broadband, you can't pull the latest clip of an eye surgery technique from Boston where it's available for free. Or if you have a mine and you can't pull geological data which is quite rich, you actually suffer. So the fact that broadband doesn't take off in South Africa is directly a policy decision. It's the government protecting Telecom, and that protection is costing the whole economy dearly. We're really falling behind.

I don't think it'll be very effective. The problem is the Department of Communications is both umpire and owner, right? So they own a stake in Telkom, the biggest telco, and at the same time they make the rules for everyone playing the game of telecommunications. It doesn't work. It's like imagine the referee of Arsenal and Manchester United, and he actually secretly has—or even publicly has—a stake in Arsenal, and he's at the same time the ref for the game. It just couldn't work. You cannot separate your instincts as an owner from your instincts as a regulator, and it's completely wrong. What should simply happen is the government should say, look, the entity that regulates telecom should be a different entity from the one that owns the stake in Telkom. So for example, Telkom could be owned by Public Enterprises, and the Department of Communications could actually be the regulator. That would work. But the current system doesn't work.

Definitely. I think TV as a whole is quite mature, and there's some ominous signs that, for example, young people are watching less TV than their parents, and that's quite dangerous. What I think is happening is that the internet is really invading TV. So when MultiChoice looks at their competitors, they're not really scared of some sort of satellite-based competitor or some terrestrial transmitter. They're thinking about the internet. Disney is sitting there in California thinking, how do I access Africa? Do I need someone like MultiChoice, or can I go direct? And Netflix is sitting in the States and saying, I'd like to colonize Africa, and so on. So virtually all the attackers are coming from the internet area. So one of the biggest things MultiChoice has to do is to be the best at providing you internet-based movies, sport—the typical TV fare. But of course, print has fallen by the wayside compared to electronic media. The same thing might happen to television. It'll take a lot longer.

We already partner with them. So imagine we talked about Manchester United a moment ago. They're looking at Africa and they're saying, I'd like to have my games displayed across the continent in as many forms as possible. Who's the best partner? And MultiChoice is a good partner because they actually have six million homes connected to the system. And Manchester United has a wonderful asset being a game. MultiChoice takes a small fee in connecting the two. The same is happening on the internet. So even now we're starting to offer movies on the internet at a fee, in competition to Apple and Netflix and everyone else. So it's a contested, vigorous field, but quite an exciting field.

I do. But you know, the ominous thing is—I was in New York a month ago, and young people, educated, graduated young people do not sit with the New York Times, one of the most delightful papers in the world in my view, and a blueberry muffin on a Sunday morning. They actually get the information on devices. And it's interesting that News24, for example, the biggest news site in the country, is already hitting two and a half million page views every day. I mean, how many newspapers get two and a half million sets of eyes across it every day? So I think the proportion of news and information conveyed by the internet will very quickly exceed that printed on paper. But I think my generation will continue to read papers because that's how I grew up. So there's a type of legacy latency element that will keep papers going for quite a while. The problem is that young people grow up differently.