The Public Investment Corporation (PIC) has increased its stake in Telkom, with the government as a whole regaining a controlling share of the company.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Telkom alerted shareholders to the change in beneficial ownership of its shares on Thursday (10 July), noting that the PIC had acquired additional company securities.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The PIC’s total interest in the ordinary shares of Telkom, held on behalf of its clients, now amounts to 10.25%.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The South African government directly owns 40.51% of Telkom, with the Department of Communications and Digital Technologies serving as the group\u2019s shareholder representative.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Including the PIC’s share, the state now has a representative 50.76% stake in the grou<\/strong>p\u2014a majority shareholding.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Although the PIC shareholding technically belongs to its beneficiaries, the state-run fund holds the proxy voting rights on those shares.<\/p>\n\n\n\n This marks a peculiar turn in the state’s interest in Telkom, after it gave up its majority shareholding in 2024.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The PIC reduced its share in Telkom over the past year from the 15.89% held in March 2024, surrendering the state\u2019s controlling stake in August that year. <\/p>\n\n\n\n At the time of Telkom’s most recent financial results, the PIC’s shareholding was even smaller at 7.45%, giving the state a total share of 48%.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Despite no longer being majority owned by the state at the time, Telkom retained its title as Telkom SA SOC Limited, with the \u201cSOC\u201d standing for State-Owned Company.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Another interesting note around the state’s shareholding is that it appears to be buying back into the company at a significant loss.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Given the group’s strong performance over the past year, its share price has increased significantly, jumping more than 60% from R33.58 at the start of the year to R55.18 during trade on Thursday.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Notably, the PIC sold its shares in Telkom when they were trading at R24 a share in August 2024. The share price has since more than doubled, costing the PIC more than double to buy back in.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The PIC also lost out on a bigger dividend payout.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The PIC\u2019s 2024 sale came just before Telkom announced a massive performance improvement, with the group hitting R7.5 billion in profit in 2025.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The group started paying dividends again, and even declared a special dividend following the sale of its tower business, Swiftnet, for R6.5 billion.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The group had suspended dividend payments for three years in 2020 to conserve cash and buy much-needed spectrum, but took another two years to return cash to shareholders.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The Public Investment Corporation (PIC) has increased its stake in Telkom, with the government as a whole regaining a controlling share of the company.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10,"featured_media":695809,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9872],"tags":[2994,65],"class_list":["post-831123","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-business","tag-pic","tag-telkom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/831123","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/10"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=831123"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/831123\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":831128,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/831123\/revisions\/831128"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/695809"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=831123"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=831123"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=831123"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}