When the lights finally stayed on in May 2025, Eskom‘s balance sheet lit up too. The state power utility said on Monday that profit after tax, the amount left after all taxes are paid, jumped to R30.3 billion for the year through March, more than double the R14 billion recorded in the previous financial year.
The surge comes after the utility ended load shedding, the rolling blackouts that have hampered factories, shops and offices for years. Eskom’s statement notes that the year included only 13 days of power cuts, a stark contrast to the hundreds of days in earlier years. The reduction in outages allowed the company to cut spending on diesel-fired turbines, expensive backup generators that were run to keep the grid afloat, by R10.6 billion.
For industrial customers, the headline number is only part of the story. While the utility managed to raise tariffs and improve the reliability of its coal-fired plants, total electricity sales fell 6.2 percent, driven by a 23 percent slump in industrial usage. That continues a decade-long trend of roughly 2 percent annual declines in sales volume.
A utility earning more while selling less
That combination, rising profit alongside falling sales volumes, is worth pausing on, because it is not how most businesses grow. It works for Eskom specifically because its revenue is driven far more by the tariff it is permitted to charge per unit of electricity than by the total volume it sells, and because a large share of this year’s profit swing came from non-operating items, lower diesel spending and smaller foreign-exchange losses, rather than from selling more power at a higher margin. A retailer or manufacturer facing the same 6.2% sales decline would typically see profit fall too; Eskom’s regulated tariff structure and one-off cost savings insulated it from that outcome this year, which is a genuinely different dynamic from an ordinary competitive business improving its underlying performance.
Dan Marokane, Eskom’s chief executive officer, told a recent interview that the company is now trying to “reignite demand from the industrial sector in particular”. He highlighted a deal struck earlier this year to keep Glencore Plc and Samancor Chrome ferrochrome smelters supplied with cheaper power, a move aimed at preserving high-energy users that are critical to the national economy.
At the same time, Eskom is courting new types of customers. Marokane said the utility is “driving new demand in the area of data centres, electric vehicles, charging stations” and is in “advanced discussions” with the regulator about selling power to crypto miners. The launch of Eskom Green, a clean-energy unit, signals the utility’s intent to compete with private renewable producers that have entered the market since reforms opened the sector to independent generators.
Even with the profit jump, the utility faces a mountain of unpaid municipal bills that stood at R119 billion in June. Eskom warned that, without “decisive intervention”, that figure could swell to R358 billion by the 2031 financial year. Debt securities and borrowings fell to R356 billion at the end of the financial year and further eased to about R320 billion by the end of June, according to the statement.
Looking ahead, Eskom plans to plough the profit into a capital-expenditure programme of R343 billion over the next five years. The spending will support plant upgrades, grid expansion and the Eskom Green unit’s push into renewable projects. The board also announced that chief financial officer Calib Cassim will retire, with a replacement to be appointed by year-end.
For small- and medium-sized enterprises that rely on a stable power supply, the double-digit profit rise offers a mixed signal. On the one hand, the end of load shedding removes a major operational risk; on the other, the decline in sales and the looming municipal debt suggest that the utility’s financial health is still fragile. Companies that can lock in long-term contracts now may benefit from the utility’s renewed focus on industrial and emerging-tech customers, but they must also watch the municipality payment saga, which could affect the timing of future tariff adjustments.
In short, Eskom’s profit headline is impressive, but the underlying challenges, falling sales, mounting unpaid bills and a need to diversify its customer base, mean the utility’s turnaround is far from complete, and much of it rests on one-off savings rather than a repeatable improvement in the core business of selling electricity.
