Buying internet a week at a time is not how the suburbs got connected. In the townships it is the whole model: Frogfoot sells prepaid vouchers that run from a week to thirty days, priced by time rather than by speed. Hypa, the prepaid brand Vox launched in 2021, does the same, and not only over Frogfoot's network. Monday's announcement is about doing a great deal more of it.
Frogfoot, Vox and Hypa have raised new equity and expanded their debt facilities in a deal that values the three businesses together at R14.4 billion, or R8.4 billion once the debt is taken off. RMB, FirstRand's corporate and investment banking arm, advised, funded and arranged the borrowing. How much new cash actually came in was not disclosed.
Who put the money in
The biggest new holding belongs not to one company but to a group of four: DNI 4PL Contracts, the JSE-listed Sabvest Capital, Masimong Group Holdings and Draper Gain International, together as the DNI Consortium. Behind them, two partnerships tied to Metier Capital Growth Fund III are reinvesting after more than twenty years in the business, and EM-Three, Simphiwe Mehlomakulu's private investment company, comes in as the third-largest direct shareholder. Management took equity alongside them.
Nobody ends up in charge. No single shareholder controls Frogfoot or Vox now, and none will once the deal is implemented. Abraham van der Merwe leads the companies, with Gert Koen as finance chief.
What the money buys
Connections, four times as many. Frogfoot has been laying fibre to homes, businesses and towers for more than twenty-five years, and the plan is to lift its rate to 360 000 connected homes a year within the next twelve months, with more than 5 000 direct jobs attached to the build.
The reason the sums work in a lower-income market is distance. Townships are denser than the suburbs, so it costs less to run cable past each home, and that lets the retail price come down without wrecking the return. The suburbs are close to finished: roughly 4.5 million households, and the better part of a decade to do them. The townships hold somewhere between 12 and 15 million homes on census data, and fewer than two million have fibre.
Everyone can see the same arithmetic. Two weeks before this deal Frogfoot launched Leap, its own prepaid fibre service, into a township market Business Day describes as heating up. Last week Comsol announced a multibillion-rand investment from Convergence Partners, Platform Investment partners and Wimsey Capital to expand fixed wireless access.
