To enable inclusive minority shareholding, the company has re-purchased its 30% shareholding from the minority partners. African Renaissance Holdings (ARH) was the senior partner and had a long-standing and successful relationship with T-Systems South Africa since 2001.
"We are grateful to ARH for their partnership on several areas of transformation and business development during this period and we are exploring alternative opportunities where the relationship will be different in future" says Gert Schoonbee, MD of T-Systems South Africa.
The 30% shareholding is now distributed through a more broad-based scheme to black employees and also to benefit communities. The scheme is performance based and reserves 10% for black females and 10% for black males. The 10% shareholding to the Community Trust is to ensure that some of the value added to T-Systems is always ploughed back to the community with a specific focus on education. Current education initiatives include the ICT Academy, the Hazyview Digital Learning Centre and the Internship Programme.
As part of the shareholder restructuring, the Board of T-Systems in South Africa has also been addressed to ensure alignment with the company's transformation journey. Maphum Nxumalo and Gert Schoonbee have been appointed as Executive Directors, together with Khangekile Simelane as Independent Non-Executive Director, Mpho Letlape, Georg Heil and Mardia van der Walt-Korsten as Non-Executive Directors for a three-year term, effective from 1 February 2014.
As a South African-led and staffed company that forms part of a globally renowned IT services group, T-Systems in South Africa combines the ingenuity and commitment of local employees with the technology and international best practice of majority shareholder Deutsche Telekom. The company's aim is to deliver "ICT that works", both for customers and the country as a whole, and to achieve this, T-Systems launched a comprehensive nation building change programme to transform itself and the country for the better. The theme for 2014 is "Transformation through Innovation" and the aim is to build on this new platform that is created with new employee shareholding.
"Since our first investment into South Africa more than 16 years ago, we have re-invested 100% of our local profits into the country in line with our policy to grow the business. With the additional impetus of the new board members, we look forward to harnessing South African ingenuity and leveraging the technology, innovation and best practice of T-Systems and Deutsche Telekom to deliver services which grow public and private sector capacity," says Schoonbee.
