It’s no secret that Vumatel is a mammoth in the telecoms industry in South Africa. It’s the largest fibre provider and ISP in the country and its financial report for the last six months of 2020 prove that beyond a shadow of a doubt. The report, released by investment holding company Remgro, revealed that Vumatel managed to make R1.092 billion in the back half of 2020. That’s revenue growth of 43% which is truly staggering.

Yet not all that surprising. That kind of growth makes sense given how the whole country was forced to live exclusively online during the months of the hard lockdown. Still, that’s a monumental amount of cash to land in a company’s lap.

Vumatel’s on the up and up

According to MyBroadband, Vumatel’s boost in revenue came as a result of “accumulated subscriber uptake growth” and the fact that it bought up a bunch of additional networks to operate through. This all helped spread the ISP’s reach further across the country and helped the company facilitate a push into areas where previously fibre-to-the-home wasn’t all that possible.

There’s also a whole load of mumbo jumbo about investment stakes and rights disputes in CIVH, which Vumatel is not only a part of but also one the biggest subsidiaries alongside DFA, that doesn’t make all that much sense. All you need to know is that Vumatel is a part of CIVH which Remgro has a majority stake in; that stake was increased by quite a large margin last year thanks to a hefty investment. This extra cash was used to ease off some debts and further expand various networks.

We know, that’s the boring stuff.

All that matters is that whether you like Vumatel or not, the company’s probably not going anywhere if it continues to pull in those kinds of numbers. This could be one of the reasons behind the ISP bringing 10Gbps fibre into South Africa much earlier than anyone expected…