Kapsch may be kaput

Johannesburg - The Austrian company that won the contract to operate the e-tolling in Gauteng has been taking a battering in the stock markets.

Opponents of the tolls have described this as “investors giving up on the project” after long delays in getting the system up and running.

This week Kapsch Trafficom, which has majority shareholding in the electronic toll collection joint venture that won the multibillion-rand contract to build and operate e-tolling, saw its stock price drop by 7.3 percent.

Reports in the US say the company has been losing about R650 million a year due to delays in the start of the e-toll system on Gauteng freeways.

Kapsch is expected to take 40 percent of at least R1.2 billion a year in toll collection fees once the project gets under way, according to the Opposition to Urban Tolling Alliance (Outa).

Yesterday, Outa chairman Wayne Duvenage said Kapsch’s stock price’s plummeting meant that “even the market has given up” on the project taking off.

“Overseas investors are starting to realise that this might not happen, seeing what happened to the Portuguese system as well,” he said.

“We have always said the costs of collection for this project were too high. There are far too many negative factors that weigh against the e-toll decision when compared to the negligible gains that will come there from,” said Duvenage.

He said Gautengers should be outraged by the fact that the company is going to take R650m a year out of the country if the project goes ahead.

It has been over two-and-half years since e-tolling was set to launch in 2011.

According to a US-based toll road news website, Kapsch and SA National Roads Agency Limited (Sanral) had misinterpreted the unity of the government and the public on the e-tolling.

Cosatu Gauteng secretary Dumisani Dakile said the news of Kapsch shares plummeting was the “beginning of their woes” together with Sanral.

“The worst is yet to come,” he said. “This system is not going to be sustainable here in Gauteng. We are not surprised by the news of stock shares tumbling because the same thing has happened in Portugal where the people were opposed to a similar system.”

Dakile said Cosatu’s programme against e-tolling would pick up at the beginning of next month to further fuel investor jitters in e-tolling.

Last year, Kapsch recorded a bumper profit of R1.2bn in its 2010/2011 financial reports from its South African operation – mostly local traffic and parking fines and the sale of e-tags, The Star reported.

The company operates across the world, including in Australia, Austria, the Czech Republic and Poland, but it was South Africa that contributed almost a third of its profit last year.

It won the contract to operate the Gauteng e-toll in a consortium with Cape Town company TMT Services and Supplies, known as Electronic Toll Collection, for eight years.

A few months later, Kapsch bought the majority shares in TMT for R75m, R14m more than the company was worth, according to The Star.

Attempts to get comment from Sanral went unanswered.

Saturday Star