Did Capitec’s Gerrie Fourie really fumble the first-ever AGM question? Why, yes

In a world stuffed to the gills with uncertainty it’s comforting to know that “Capitec knows no ambiguity”.  

Or is it?  

Well, that’s what Capitec chair Santie Botha thinks. She also thinks, when it comes to Capitec, “progress has no rest”. 

We were about four minutes into the Capitec AGM and it was hard not to fear we might have a couple of hours of pithy sayings ahead of us. But then management-speak Botha pulled herself up and reminded us of Chris Otto’s advice (or was it instruction?): “Keep it quick.” 

Otto, who was a founding director of Capitec, has been on the Capitec board for 26 years and, as PSG shareholders will know (he’s also a director of PSG), he has a bit of an obsession with speedy AGMs. 

Rather bizarrely, given Otto’s advice/instruction, Botha evidently didn’t think reading out the resolutions one by one was a complete and extremely tedious waste of time.

Making it all a touch odder was that after each resolution was read out, Botha firmly urged shareholders, “Please vote now,” no doubt confident in the presumption that no shareholder intended asking a question, the answer to which might throw light on any one of the resolutions. This was after all Capitec, where there is no ambiguity. And also, usually, no questions. 

Anyway, the whole resolution thing was over by 2.49pm. (It started at 2.30pm.) “It’s now question time,” announced Botha. 

Traditionally this has been the shortest part of Capitec’s AGM because, traditionally, no questions are ever asked. So, imagine everyone’s surprise when someone in the packed auditorium put up their hand. 

Here was a very appreciative shareholder who had bought the share back in 2002 when it was just R2. It’s currently R3,500 give or take a few rands. After lauding the Capitec team for their outstanding performance the shareholder asked if there was any chance the share could be split to make it affordable for more investors. 

Now, to emphasise, this shareholder did not say: “Was there any truth in that Viceroy report?” But, given the dismissive tone of CEO Gerrie Fourie’s response to the question, you would have thought he had. 

Fourie seemed to be exhibiting the signs of someone who has driven progress for a full 11 years without rest. It’s also possible he was quite emotional about the fact he was minutes away from stepping down from a dynamic company he had helped lead for 25 years. 

Whatever the reason, Fourie committed the unpardonable AGM error – he was abrupt and gave the shareholder short shrift. All the more unforgivable given that here was a shareholder who was grateful, deferential and looking for an answer to an interesting question. Furthermore, by some counts, it was the first question ever asked at a Capitec AGM. This was a historic moment. 

Fourie told the meeting the issue had come up before (never at an AGM) and the answer was no, the share would not be split. If investors were interested they could buy bits of a Capitec share through EasyEquities. 

So, here we have a bank targeting low-income consumers that couldn’t be bothered to look at a way low-income consumers might be able to buy full shares of their favourite bank. Okay. 

Fourie was a little more forthcoming about the stoic shareholder’s second question relating to security around the bank’s app. 

After a few online questions from Mehluli Mncube of ESG Insight, the Q&A session was over and the formal part of the agenda closed. It was 3.03pm. 

For the next hour Fourie gave an impassioned account of his years at Capitec. The delivery was as interesting as the content, which has become the stuff of familiar legend. The passion he has devoted to the group was evident particularly towards the end. Tears began to flow as he gave thanks to a wonderful family who might have preferred he’d rested a little more. 

So, Capitec gets 20 points out of 20 for holding a hybrid meeting and five out of five for ease of access for guests. For quality of video it gets 10 points out of a possible 20 because the camera was focused almost entirely on the podium for the duration of the meeting. This meant online shareholders could only watch Botha and Fourie – apart from the brief Q&A session. Other directors were in attendance but were never visible to online participants. 

Capitec gets 10 points out of 10 for ensuring it was easy to ask questions. It gets five out of 20 for the way questions were answered. And because Currency could not track down any minutes of previous AGMs or recordings, Capitec gets zero out of 10, for a grand total of 50 out of a possible 85. 

Access issues

Next up was Ninety One, which is proving to be something of a recidivist when it comes to AGM matters. How 90s not to give access to anyone who pitches up, electronically speaking. 

It was a hybrid event for UK-based shareholders but audio only for South African shareholders. This might be problematic for the Companies and Intellectual Property Commission, which last year issued a guideline for AGMs conducted electronically. It included the following: “Shareholders (should) be able to see and know who else is attending the AGM online and to be able to interact with each other without an intermediary.” 

So, for holding a meeting that could only be attended by audio link, Ninety One gets five out of a potential 20 points. The meeting was closed to guests, so that’s zero out of five. There was no video link so that’s another zero. Eight out of 10 for shareholders’ ability to ask questions and 20 out of 20 for the quality of engagement in the Q&A session.  

As for the minutes, the last Currency could locate were for 2021. That’s a grand total of 33 points out of 85. 

This total accurately reflects the technical aspects of the meeting but does no justice to the exceptional quality of the Q&A session, which really is the essence of a shareholder meeting. 

CEO Hendrik du Toit provided extremely informative responses to all the questions – posed from the floor in London and the phone line in Cape Town. He and chair Gareth Penny dealt with a wide range of issues relating to Ninety One’s investment strategy in various corners of the world. Inevitably AI came up, and Du Toit confirmed its importance but also cautioned: “We haven’t yet seen the efficiencies claimed for AI.” 

Also inevitable were the questions about sustainability, which both Penny and Du Toit seemed to embrace. Their responses were in no way defensive, nor were they laden with the sort of marketing guff boards usually trot out in place of answers; they were impressively informative. 

What a shame, they can’t seem to get the technical side right. 

A grim affair

Finally, there was the get-it-over-as-quickly-as-possible PSG AGM. It kicked off at 12pm and would have been finished by 12.07pm if it hadn’t been for chair Willem Theron reading out each of the resolutions, followed by “please record your vote”. (It’s obviously a family thing – check Capitec above.) And then there was CEO Francois Gouws, who spent 15 minutes talking about all the sort of stuff shareholders hear every day of their lives. 

(So, if Chris Otto, a founding director of PSG, is looking for ways to “keep it quicker” there are two areas for potential cuts.) 

At 12.08pm shareholders were asked to finalise their voting and told that the social and ethics report could be downloaded from the integrated annual report on the website. At 12.09pm it was over to Gouws and at 12.24pm the meeting was declared closed. 

So, PSG gets 10 out of 20 points for a virtual-only offering; a full five points for ease of access; five out of 20 for quality of video because the camera was focused constantly on Theron and then on Gouws, and no wide shots of a room filled with PSG directors. There were no shareholder questions (there almost never are), so categories four and five don’t apply. Currency couldn’t find the minutes of any shareholder meeting, which means zero out of five for that. 

It was one of the grimmest, most pointless AGMs Currency has attended, which may be the way Otto and his board colleagues want it. It probably doesn’t even deserve the 20 points out of a potential 50 it scored. 

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