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31 March 2010

Telkom blooms with enterprise development

From an 18-year old assistant florist to a thriving businesswoman. That's the phenomenal success story of MaDelta Tefu (62), whose industry and perseverance - coupled with Telkom's support and promotion of enterprise development - culminated in the grand opening of her florist outlet at Telkom's Pretoria campus today.

After learning her trade under two different florists in Pretoria, MaDelta's initial involvement with Telkom started 13 years ago when she began supplying floral arrangements to the Telkom library in her personal capacity. Her exotic touch with flowers was soon recognised and, before long, she was supplying flowers for all six receptions at the Telkom Towers North and South buildings in Pretoria, as well as for various other divisions within the two buildings. She also does floral arrangements for Telkom employees.

For the past 12 years, MaDelta's burgeoning entrepreneurship was conducted from a small room on one of Telkom's parking levels. Besides space constraints, this environment was not entirely conducive for the life span of her flowers.

All this has now changed with the grand opening of MaDelta's Florist Shop which is an integral part of Telkom's enterprise development programme. Ouma Rasethaba, Telkom's Chief of Corporate governance, explained that as a responsible corporate citizen, Telkom was committed to enterprise development essentially because it promotes job creation and supports the national agenda.

"Telkom's Corporate Affairs Office, together with Telkom Procurement, established a Delta Florist Project," said Rasethaba. "The Project was responsible for identifying a space for the shop, buying equipment and liaising with key stakeholders in finance, security and legal."

As part of the Delta Florist Project, Telkom will carry the rental for the first five years, as well as costs around utilities, fittings and establishing and renovating the premises.

In addition, the agreement also encompasses skills training in all business and operations fundamentals as well as a six-month mentorship programme. "This includes customer service and interpersonal skills training, finance, labour relations, marketing and an understanding of the basic conditions of employment," stated Rasethaba.

She added: "Telkom has also assisted MaDelta in drawing up employment contracts for her staff members and registering them for the Unemployment Insurance Fund (UIF). Telkom has further allocated resources to help MaDelta with finance and marketing. This is to ensure accurate bookkeeping and to assist with increasing sales volumes."

Although her work entails long hours, MaDelta remains enthusiastic and undeterred. “I am active and young and won’t disappoint Telkom. I will expand the business and employ other people,” stated MaDelta. Currently, it is mainly members of her family that will work at her shop.

"I love flowers. They are important because they cheer everyone up. Now, with Telkom's help, my prayers of running a professional florist store have been answered," concluded MaDelta.

For further enquiries, please contact:

Pynee Chetty

Senior Specialist: Media Relations

Group Communication

Tel:+27 12 642 1716

Mobile: +27 81 389 7874

Email: chettpr2@telkom.co.za

OR

Leigh-Ann Francis

Specialist: Media Relations

Group Communication

Tel: +27 12 642 1728

Mobile: +27 81 391 4780

Email: francilm@telkom.co.za

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ABOUT TELKOM:

Telkom is a leading communications services provider in South Africa. We had consolidated operating revenue of R16.8 billion and normalised profit after tax of R1, 683 million for the period ended 30 September 2015. Total assets amounted to R41.9 billion and equity attributable to the owners of Telkom to R23.5 billion as of 30 September 2015. The group generated normalised free cash flow of R1.4 billion for the period ended 30 September 2015.

As of 30 September 2015, we had approximately 3.3 million telephone access lines in service and 1,030,441 ports connected via MSAN access. We offer business, residential and payphone customers a wide range of services and products, including:

  • fixed-line retail voice services using PSTN (Public Switched Telephone Network) lines, including ISDN (Integrated Services Digital Network) lines, and the sale of subscription based value-added voice services and calling plans;
  • fixed-line customer premises equipment rental and sales services both voice and data needs and these include PABX, Computers, Routers, Modems, Telephone handsets and other ancillary equipment;
  • interconnection services, including terminating and transiting traffic from South African mobile operators, as well as from international operators and transiting traffic from mobile to international destinations;
  • fixed-line data services, including domestic and international data transmission services, such as point-to-point leased lines, ADSL (Asymmetrical Digital Subscriber Line) services, packet-based services, managed data networking services and internet access and related information technology services;
  • Data Centre Operations includes e-commerce, application service provider, hosting, data storage, e-mail and security services;
  • W-CDMA (Wideband Code Division Multiple Access), a 3G next generation network, including fixed voice services, data services and nomadic voice services;
  • mobile communication services, including voice services, data services and handset sales through our mobile navbar-brand called Telkom Mobile;
  •  information and communication services including cloud services, infrastructure services, workspace services, global service integration management and hardware and network equipment sales locally, in seven African countries, the UK and Dubai through Business Connexion Group; and
  • other services including directory services, through Trudon (Pty) Ltd, wireless data services, through Swiftnet (Pty) Ltd.

Convergence is one of our key strategic initiatives in building a sustainable future for Telkom.  We will lead the provision of converged services in South Africa in support of our mission statement: Seamlessly connecting people to a better life.