Our strategic priorities

Our ambition is to create value for our shareholders on a sustainable basis by leveraging our existing platform to create a broader ecosystem of consumer services. We plan to do this by maintaining a leadership position in our traditional video business, and by capturing the nascent African SVOD opportunity with our global streaming partner. We also aim to support investee companies, KingMakers (sports betting) and Moment (fintech), on their development paths and will consider further targeted investments or strategic partnerships over time.

Drive growth and support retention and activity rates in our linear business

Growing and maintaining a vibrant subscriber base remains key to our long-term success as a group, even if short-term macro-economic headwinds negatively impact our momentum, as was the case in FY24. Our linear pay-TV base forms the foundation for our broader set of strategic priorities and sub-Saharan Africa offers a large addressable market for our portfolio of products and services given growing disposable income levels on the back of a growing working-age population, urbanisation, and improving access to electricity, mobile connectivity, smart connected devices, and financial services. Our aim is to capture opportunities through strategic innovation, partnerships and investments in order to sustain growth and support customer activity levels, retention and loyalty.

Our South African subscriber base reflects unique characteristics across the various packaged tiers, requiring us to cater differently for our subscribers’ specific requirements and circumstances. Given South Africa’s current economic and loadshedding challenges, we are particularly focused on retention in our largest market, while some growth opportunities still remains to be explored in the mass market as and when market conditions improve.

In the Rest of Africa, scaling our customer base and implementing inflationary-linked pricing remain an essential element of the segment’s path to self-sustaining cash generation. This is also critically important in driving operating leverage into a largely fixed-cost base to offsetting currency headwinds. Our Rest of Africa markets remain underpenetrated and supportive of sustained growth outside of periodic short-term macro economic and currency-led market challenges.

Leverage SVOD capabilities to accelerate adoption

Our track record reflects our ability to pursue innovation and adopt new technologies with the aim of catering for our customers’ ever-evolving needs. Although there have historically been challenges around broadband access and affordability in our markets, customer behaviour is increasingly moving online. We believe that we are approaching an inflection point in broadband availability and affordability, which will support an acceleration in streaming service adoption. As such, it is critical that we position our business ahead of the growth curve and anticipated increase in competition.

By joining forces with Comcast to relaunch our Showmax offering, we are looking to build on our historic streaming success and accelerate the uptake of our SVOD service by leveraging our local content and execution capabilities, as well as the Comcast group’s international content and scaled technology capabilities. We are aiming to become the leading streaming service on the continent as the market opportunity scales by:

• Further differentiating and strengthening our content line-up, particularly in local content, sport and through one of the leading global content portfolios
• Continuing to improve the UI, UX and scalability of our service, by leveraging the best technical features of Peacock and Showmax

We are mindful of the global commentary and debate around streaming models as we exit a decade of cheap money and a ‘growth at any cost’ mindset. With the benefit of a long-term view and hindsight from observing the experience of our global peers, we are working with our partners to develop and execute a streaming strategy that does not pursue scale at the expense of sustainable economics and appropriate returns on investment.

Streaming is quickly becoming a consumer preference in developed markets and, notwithstanding necessary refinements to the business model, the world is not going to walk back from this technology-enabled evolution in video. Our objective, then, is to become the streaming service of choice for all Africans as part of our broader set of video services that cater to the needs of all our consumers.

Enhance our ecosystem of scalable, tech-based consumer services

To complement our existing Video Entertainment business, we are looking to develop future revenue streams by investing in opportunities that are consumer-focused, leverage our scale and local advantages, and are underpinned by scalable technology. We are well positioned to develop and support a compelling ecosystem of consumer services in sub-Saharan Africa given: our scale and distribution capabilities; our reach of over 21m households across 50 countries; our proven track record of delivering video entertainment services over nearly 40 years; our investment in enduring relationships with customers and suppliers; our ability to manage in-country regulatory, language and cultural nuances; and our unrivalled payment collection capabilities.

We have already invested in select areas with high growth potential such as KingMakers (interactive entertainment and sports betting) and Moment (fintech and payments), opting for strategic partnerships in market segments outside of our core competencies. In addition, we concluded value-enhancing partnerships such as our broadband service provisioning through DStv Internet and will continue looking for more opportunities that fit our investment/capital allocation criteria to further expand our ecosystem, add value to our customers’ lives and create shareholder value.

Maintain operational excellence and sustain cost reduction

Our aim is to deliver positive operating leverage through time – keeping the organic growth in our cost base below the organic growth in revenue, thereby supporting group margins and free cash flow generation. We continuously strive for operational excellence and optimising cost efficiencies across our business. From time to time, this may require some upfront investment as we redesign certain critical systems to support our future business requirements and customer needs. We are also scaling our analytics and AI capabilities, focusing on improving customer experience, driving revenue, enhancing content discovery and reducing costs.

Our Technology business, Irdeto, is one of the leading companies globally in providing digital platform security, content protection applications and cybersecurity solutions for the media and entertainment industry, while our Advertising business, DStv Media Sales, is one of the leading advertising platforms and partners on the continent. Our aim is to drive revenue market share through our B2B platforms in order to enhance group revenues and supporting overall group margins and free cash flow generation.