Today Multichoice has listed on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange as a publicly traded company. This comes after Naspers hinted on spinning off its video entertainment division in to what now becomes Multichoice Group.
Multichoice group now includes Multichoice South Africa, Multichoice Africa, Showmax Africa and Irdeto as earlier told. This means Multichoice has become a separate company from Naspers.
Multichoice is also said to be the world’s fastest growing PayTV service provider globally with its multi-platform business having over 13.5 million subscribers across Africa.
A bulk of these come from South Africa which has been threatened by the continued rise of Netflix there,owing to the growth of FTTH internet services. This has seen DSTV lose premium subscribers flocking to Netflix thus affecting Naspers bottomline. One of the reasons suspected to have prompted the spin off.
While Multhcoise continues to grow, it should be noted that most of its DSTV subscribers opt for its lowly priced bouquets instead of its premium offering, which out of reach for majority of Africans. Also, in a move to catch up with Netflix, they launched Showmax which is more or less the same service, though its not yet doomsday for Multichoice given the service now comes bundled with its pricier bouquets on top of DSTV Now, both OTT services that Netflix is yet to match.
The Multichoice share starting price was R95 (around 25,000 UGX) and the company started trading at 09:00 AM local times.
