Remgro owns 57% of the company that owns Vumatel and Dark Fibre Africa, which makes it the biggest shareholder in South Africa's largest fibre group. Last year that stake took R93 million out of its headline earnings. This year it put R319 million in. The swing is R412 million, and only four months of the deal that caused it are inside the figures.
The deal is one Vodacom spent four years getting past the competition authorities. On 1 December Vodacom subscribed for 30% of Maziv, the company that holds the fibre networks, paying partly in cash and partly by handing over fibre assets of its own. Community Investment Ventures Holdings saw its interest in Maziv diluted to 70% as a result, and with it a slice of its indirect interests in Vumatel and Dark Fibre Africa. What it got back was a share of everything Vodacom put in, counted from December, which is four months of a reporting year that ends in March.
The two networks doing the work
Maziv is not one business. Vumatel runs the fibre that goes into houses and is the largest such network in the country; Dark Fibre Africa runs the open-access lines inside and between towns that internet providers rent space on; Herotel, SADV, Rise Telecoms and BritelinkMCT sit alongside them. Vumatel is where the growth is. Its revenue rose 15.3%, to R4.43 billion, and operating profit grew by well over half. Dark Fibre Africa is the steadier half of the pair: R3 billion of revenue, up close to a tenth, with operating profit growing at about the same rate as it kept a lid on costs.
What Remgro took out along the way
Remgro did not wait for the earnings to turn before taking money out. On completion of the Vodacom and Herotel transactions it received pre-implementation dividends from CIVH of R3.055 billion. Herotel is the other piece of the year: Vumatel bought 45% of it in February 2022 and CIVH finished the takeover in 2025. Across the whole portfolio, CIVH's R412 million improvement was the third largest of the contribution increases Remgro named, behind Mediclinic and the Rainbow chicken business.
The group finished the year with headline earnings per share up 42.2%, to R20.03, and sits on more than R22 billion of cash with no debt against it. Chief executive Jannie Durand told the results presentation that Remgro is open for business, has the liquidity to execute, and will look seriously at the right deal in the right sector. Agriculture and infrastructure are the two it named.
Whatever it buys next, the fibre arm's first full year with Vodacom's assets inside it has only just started.
