Patrice Motsepe’s African Rainbow Capital (ARC) has put a date on the launch of TymeBank’s Philippines operation; October 2022. ARC published its trading statement for the four months to 30 April on Friday morning, where it stated that Tymebank continues to acquire about 130 000 customers per month.
However, ARC added that growing active accounts has proved to be challenging for the bank, given the tough economic environment with added pressure on consumers. But it is making headway in that regard. The bank reached a 4 million customer mark in October 2021.
At the rate of 130 000 new customers a month, the bank should reach 5 million customers this June. But it hasn’t released statistics recently to show how many of those accounts are active.
On TymeBank’s international expansion, ARC said the bank’s fellow subsidiary company, Tyme Global and plans to finally launch GOtyme in the Philippines in October 2022.
The bank has always targeted to launch GOTyme in the third quarter of 2022 and is looking at the possibility of expanding into a third market in 2023.
Other ARC investments
On its other investments, ARC said it has finalized its divestment in fiber network provider, Metro fiber, after the recent approval by the industry regulator. The company got R275 million from that disposal, realizing an overall gain of R37 million.
“An amount of R244 million of the consideration was received in April 2022, with the remaining R31 million being receivable in June 2022,” said the company in the trading update.
Regarding Rain’s new spectrum acquisition, ARC said while the additional capacity is expected to positively impact the valuation of the ARC Fund’s investment in the mobile data operator, the impact on Rain’s cash-flow forecast is still being finalized. Therefore, the estimated impact of the spectrum auction will only be reflected in the June 2022 valuation of the ARC Fund’s investment in Rain.
Rain successfully acquired 2x10MHz in the 700MHz band and 20MHz in the 2.6GHz band for a total price of R1.43 billion in the recent government spectrum auction.
On the downside, ARC said the commissioning of Kropz Plc’s Elandsfontein phosphate mine is progressing slower than expected. Initially, ARC expected the mine to be commissioned in the last quarter of 2021.
But some “bottlenecks” in Transnet’s capacity to export phosphate through the Port of Saldanha and the need to re-engineer parts of the project delayed this. But the mine completed the first introduction of ore into the plant in January 2022.
“This has resulted in delays in production and the ARC Fund has subsequently had to extend further funding for working capital purposes. The ARC Fund remains committed to seeing the project through to commissioning. Market demand for phosphate and fertilizer remains strong,” wrote ARC in the update.
But the company said progress has been made in ramping up production. Kropz Plc said in its recent update that Elandsfontein is now expected to achieve its first significant revenues in the later part of the second quarter.
Source: News 24
