South African Post Office (SAPO) has said their banking unit, Postbank, will be transformed into a separate company next year to better position it in the country’s financial sector, reports Reuters.
Read MoreSA Post Office expects to see another year of profitability, despite the economic crisis.
Read MoreMail & Express Review February 2009
Read MorePresenting the results today, the South African Post Office (Sapo) posted a 12pct rise in profit before tax of R565m (2007: R507m) for the 2008 financial year on the back of a 7pct rise in revenue from R5.2bn in 2007 to R5.6bn in the year under review.
She said that the group’s shareholder had agreed to continue providing a subsidy to the Sapo of R372m for the coming year. This will be increased to R383m in 2010. This subsidy is primarily used to assist with the necessary operational and capital expenditure required to service areas that are not commercially viable in South Africa, yet do require services as mandated by the shareholder in terms of its licence and agreed upon by Sapo as part of its Universal Service Obligations.
The past year has seen many operational highlights, top of the agenda being the new business model that was defined and approved by the board of the Sapo, which in itself made major strides towards further compliance with codes of good corporate governance and the King 2 code, by establishing a Group Chairperson’s Committee, equivalent to an Investment Committee in a Public Company. The new operational design sees the group structured into 5 divisions:
• Mail
• Logistics
• Financial Services
• ICT and
• Property.
A roll-out of 5.7-million additional postal addresses has been achieved in the last three years to the end of March 2008, the SA Post Office (Sapo) said on Friday.
The project aimed to provide formal addresses to thousands of South Africans who previously did not have addresses, limiting their access to the mainstream economy.
Of the 5.7-million total addresses, 3.76-million (66 percent) were in rural areas and 1.94-million (34 percent) were in urban areas — bringing the number of addresses in the country to 12.5-million.
Before the Sapo project started, tribal and informal settlement communities found themselves negatively affected by Financial Intelligence Centre Act (Fica) regulations, as these required proof of residential address before any financial transactions could be effected.
In rural and informal settlements, Sapo found that a household had several different identifiers or numbers on the door, using different methods.
Rural address allocation has now been completed for large portions of the country. This included location details (registering villages within areas, identifying sections and dwellings in villages), client details (head of each dwelling, contact details) and postal details (post office, route and postcode).
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