Eskom will not cut electricity prices after reporting roughly R30.35 billion in profit, chair Mteto Nyati has confirmed. The utility will also not declare a dividend. Nyati says the money will go into expanding operations, particularly renewables, transmission lines and interconnectors, and investments that support data centre growth.

He argues that scale will spread costs across more customers and bring prices down over the medium to long term.

The financial report is blunter than the interview. Eskom explicitly flags the rise of self-generation and wheeling as a threat to future cash flows, and states it will lean on network charges, customer wheeling arrangements and revised tariff structures to protect revenue. In plain terms, customers who buy less from Eskom but stay connected to its grid are expected to make up the difference.

The utility has committed to ending double-digit increases, which is not the same as prices falling. Its own forecast assumes increases averaging 6% a year from 2029 through to 2050, double the Reserve Bank's 3% inflation target. That assumption is load-bearing.

In assessing its cash-generating unit, Eskom notes the recoverable amount may be below the carrying amount if the long-term price path after 2028 is limited to inflationary increases, and describes the long-term path as a significant source of estimation uncertainty. So a tariff trajectory at inflation could trigger an impairment.

BusinessTech reported Nyati's comments and set them against the results, noting a 4% revenue rise and a 116% jump in profit came despite lower sales, meaning fewer customers paid more. Eskom's results statement carries the underlying figures. Business Day reported at the results that weaker sales are the new problem, with chief financial officer Calib Cassim saying the utility must convert surplus capacity into sales.

Read the network charges line carefully, because it is aimed at a specific customer. If you have installed solar, cut your consumption and stayed on the grid for backup, Eskom has named you as a cash flow risk and said it will use network charges and revised tariff structures in response.

That is already happening at municipal level, where a Mpumalanga municipality is facing legal action over a levy charged to properties that generate all their own power. The commercial question for any business that has partly self-generated is what the fixed component of your bill looks like in three years, not what the unit rate is today.

There is a defensible case on Eskom's side. It genuinely does need transmission investment, and it is selling less electricity than it did twenty years ago while carrying the same fixed costs. But asking customers to fund a turnaround while telling them prices will rise at double inflation until 2050 is a hard sell after a R30-billion profit.

You might also like our piece on Eskom's profit more than doubling, Cape Town buying power below Eskom rates, and the revised electricity pricing policy reshaping tariffs.

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