South African tech companies with the best salaries – MyBroadband

An analysis by MyBroadband shows that MultiChoice South Africa, Broadband Infraco, and Eskom have the highest average salaries among South African tech or tech-adjacent companies.

MultiChoice’s dominance as South Africa’s leading pay-TV broadcaster came about as the result of innovation by its founder Koos Bekker.

MultiChoice was the first company to launch a pay-TV satellite service outside of the US in the 90s.

It now also owns several other businesses operating in the field of technology.

Aside from its DStv and Showmax pay-TV and streaming businesses, MultiChoice has anti-piracy software firm Irdeto, personal safety app Namola, and online sports betting platform Kingmakers in its fold.

According to MultiChoice South Africa’s latest financial statements, it had 3,482 permanent employees at the end of its 2024 financial year.

It paid a total of R3.603 billion in remuneration to these employees, which includes:

• Salaries, wages, and bonuses
• Equity-settled share-based compensation
• Retirement benefit costs
• Medical aid fund contributions
• Other costs

Using this full amount and the permanent employee count, we calculated that the average MultiChoice SA salary was R1.03 million per annum, the most of any tech or tech-adjacent company in South Africa.

The relatively high wage bill is concerning, considering that MultiChoice’s financials have been in dire straits in the past two years, where it recorded back-to-back annual losses of R3.5 billion in 2023 and R4 billion in 2024.

Using only the R2.933 billion of MultiChoice SA’s basic salaries, wages, and bonuses, the average decreases to R842,332.

That would put its average salary second only to Broadband Infraco, which paid employees an average of R970,605 in its 2023 financial year.

The government-owned broadband infrastructure provider spent R106.9 million on remuneration, with just 109 employees on its payroll that year.

The third highest average salary is paid by another government-owned company — Eskom.

The power utility’s wage bill for the 2022/2023 financial year stood at a whopping R32.3 billion across its workforce of 39,601, which many experts have argued is bloated.

Its average salary per employee during that year was about R815,636.

The next three companies in the top six highest payers were also entirely or majority state-owned companies.

These were Sentech, Telkom, and the SABC, which had average salaries ranging from R762,000 to R796,000.

A note on calculating average salaries

It should be noted that our methodology of dividing the total remuneration for the year by the companies’ employee counts can result in some significant upward skewing as executives are generally paid substantially more than other workers.

A better way to examine the average salaries would be to use the mean and median. However, the median cannot be extracted from the financial results or integrated reports.

Some tech companies are very transparent about these differences — like Altron.

Its latest integrated report revealed that its 10% highest-paid employees’ average earnings was R1.57 million per year, 12 times the R129,671 average annual salary of its 10% lowest-paid employees.

MultiChoice SA does reveal that its lowest salary was almost three times the current minimum wage set by the government.

This is currently R27.58 per hour, which works out to R4,412.80 over a four-week period with 40-hour work weeks.

MultiChoice also said its guaranteed salary was targeted at the median of the market, with exceptions based on performance and critical skills.

The table below shows the average salaries of major tech or tech-adjacent companies.

Naspers was excluded from this comparison as a large part of its staff complement is based overseas, despite its headquarters being in Cape Town.