ADSL on its last legs in South Africa

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  By   Daniel Puchert Partially state-owned telecommunications company Telkom announced in its financial results for the year ending 31 March 2025 that its ADSL subscribers had more than halved to under 30,000. According to the company’s operational data, ADSL lines decreased from 64,959 in March 2024 to 29,770. This 54.2% decline highlights that the legacy broadband technology is slowly approaching the end of the road. Telkom’s ADSL business peaked at the end of March 2016 with 1.01 million subscribers — two years after fibre upstart Vumatel  broke ground in Parkhurst . What followed was a sharp decline in Telkom ADSL subscribers. Customers connected to its copper networks decreased by more than 500,000 over the next four years. This was partly driven by Telkom itself, which began actively switching off its copper network in some neighbourhoods. If it did not have fibre in the area, it would offer a “fixed line lookalike” wireless service that ran over its cellular ...
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Chinese developer misses bond payment, as stress spills beyond Evergrande

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A mid-size Chinese real estate developer failed to make a $205.7 million payment due to bondholders Tuesday

Topics
Evergrande | China | Real Estate

AP  |  Beijing 

Evergrande
Representative image

A mid-size Chinese real estate developer failed to make a $205.7 million payment due to bondholders Tuesday, adding to the industry's financial strain as one of China's biggest developers tries to avoid defaulting on billions of dollars of debt.

Fantasia Holdings Group announced it missed the payment in a statement issued through the Hong Kong Stock Exchange. It gave no explanation but said it had asked for trading of Fantasia shares to be suspended.

Some Chinese developers are struggling to repay debt after regulators tightened limits last year on their use of borrowed money. That is fuelling fears about possible defaults and turmoil in financial markets.

Investors are worried Evergrande Group might collapse with 2 trillion yuan ($310 billion) of debt. The company has missed at least one payment to bondholders abroad but has yet to be declared in default.

Economists say Beijing can prevent a broader credit crunch if Evergrande defaults but wants to avoid bailing out the company or its creditors as a warning to other borrowers and lenders to be more disciplined.

Fantasia, valued by the stock market at $415 million, reported a 153 million yuan ($24 million) profit for the first half of 2021 and said revenue rose 18.5% over a year earlier to 10.9 billion yuan ($1.7 billion).

Hundreds of smaller Chinese developers have gone bankrupt since regulators began tightening control over the industry's financing in 2017 amid concern about rising debt and the possible risk of a financial crisis.

In March, another developer, Fortune Land Development Co. said it missed interest and debt payments totalling 5.3 billion yuan ($813.5 million).

(Only the headline and picture of this report may have been reworked by the Business Standard staff; the rest of the content is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)

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First Published: Tue, October 05 2021. 14:08 IST

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