SABC hopes for profit in 2012

Cape Town - The cash-strapped SA Broadcasting Corporation will start turning a profit by 2012, MPs heard on Tuesday.

"Losses will come down and the corporation move to profitability by March 2012," SABC interim board chair Irene Charnley told members of Parliament's communications portfolio committee.

Further, the national broadcaster planned to repay all its debts by the end of the 2014 financial year.

Over and above the R200m it was granted by Treasury last week, announced by Finance Minister Pravin Gordhan in his mid-year Budget, the SABC had also applied for a five-year government guarantee to the tune of about R1.4bn. This would "allow the corporation to borrow money from institutions", Charnley said.

On the R200m, she said the broadcaster was set to receive the funds between this month and March next year, and would use the money to pay for commissioned local content programmes.

Charnley told MPs the corporation's losses stood at R910 million, but this figure was expected to start dropping, "even in this financial year".

The figure would not rise, she assured the committee.

A "big problem" was costs, which had risen steeply, and remained higher than the corporation's income.

The SABC had also been running an overdraft of between R580m and R600m since March, the start of the current financial year.

Cost-cutting measures and the turnaround strategy implemented by the interim board over the past four-and-a-half months had saved the corporation about R65m.

Charnley said the SABC was now "stable", and the interim board was preparing to hand over to the recently-announced permanent board in the middle of this month.

- Sapa