Big Cell C productivity improvement

The latest financial data from South Africa’s largest telecommunications companies show that Cell C has higher revenue per employee than MTN, Vodacom, and Telkom.

Revenue per employee – calculated by dividing a company’s revenue by the number of employees – is an important ratio to measure how much money an employee generates.

It is a valuable ratio to help organisations determine the efficiency and productivity of their workforce.

Telkom, for example, has struggled for years with low revenue per employee, forcing it to cut its workforce significantly.

Telkom started cutting staff and reduced its workforce from 61,237 employees in 1999 to 23,520 ten years later.

Despite these significant staff cuts, Telkom was still considered inefficient and out of sync with its peers.

Telkom currently generates R3.7 million per employee, far less than Vodacom’s R8.8 million and MTN’s R11.9 million.

Considering Telkom’s low productivity, it is unsurprising that it cut another 1,200 employees earlier this year, with more to come.

Cell C has also cut much of its workforce over the last few years, but its results were significantly better than Telkom’s.

The mobile operator reduced its workforce from around 2,600 employees to only 900, which helped it increase its revenue per employee to R13.2 million.

To put this in perspective, in 2019, Cell C generated R15.4 billion in revenue with around 2,600 employees. This equates to R5.9 million in revenue per employee.

The employee productivity improvement and other cost-cutting measures are good news for Cell C, which has struggled to make ends meet.

Revenue per employee

The table below shows the revenue per employee based on each telecommunications company’s latest financial reports.

Operator	Revenue	Employees	Revenue per employee
Cell C	R11.9 billion	900	R13.2 million
MTN	R207 billion	17,462	R11.9 million
Vodacom	R119 billion	13,605	R8.8 million
Telkom	R43.1 billion	11,624	R3.7 million