JOHANNESBURG - Calgro M3 Group, the residential housing and memorial parks group, may have turned around to profitability in the 2020 financial year, but its executives won’t be benefiting from the improvement this year in terms of pay.
Yesterday, Calgro M3 made its annual reports available, becoming one of very few JSE-listed companies to release their annual reports so soon after their annual financial results (one day). This included a separate annual report on corporate governance and an environmental, social and governance (ESG) annual report for the group.
The group on Monday reported a turnaround in its 2020 financial year to February 29, after headline earnings per share increased 108.7percent to 1.77 cents.
Chief executive Wikus Lategan said restructuring over two years had also put the group on a much more solid footing to face the uncertainties around the Covid-19 pandemic.
The annual report showed that Lategan received R3.37 million in guaranteed remuneration for the year under review, this after executives in September last year agreed to a zero percent increase. He and the four other executives received R11.11 million in total compensation.
Lategan’s pay was well down from the R12.36 million he received last year, while the total remuneration to executives was also well down from R38.7 million paid to them in 2019.
The difference was because executives also received zero in short-term performance payments for 2020, “given the financial performance for the 2018, 2019 and 2020 financial years”, according to the annual report.
Executive share scheme expenses for 2020 fell to R4.49 million from R38.8 million.
The total employee cost and share appreciation rights settlement came to R46.9 million in 2020, from R132.1 million the previous year.
The total staff complement, including agents, reduced by 24.7 percent during the year to 317, but the annual report noted that staff and sub-contractor complements were expected to increase again once operations at sites resumed to normal levels.
The annual report also emphasised that at the 2019 AGM, 99.87 percent of the votes were in favour of the remuneration policy and on the implementation of the remuneration report.
Shareholders of other listed groups have often voted against these resolutions.
Calgro’s ESG report covers many aspects from corporate social responsibility to improving the lives of employees, environmental initiatives and ethics. For instance, on some energy saving initiatives, the group said the introduction of gas reticulation at its housing projects had resulted in a reduction of the electricity requirement per residential unit to about 1.5kVA from 3.5kVA.
The use of gas equated to about 70 percent of the energy use of the residential unit, and resulted in a monthly savings on energy of about 25 percent. Heat pumps, induction geysers and solar geysers were some of the other energy savings initiatives by the group.
BUSINESS REPORT