South Africa's Competition Commission has referred MultiChoice South Africa and set-top-box maker Altech UEC to the Competition Tribunal for prosecution, alleging the two firms struck a February 2014 agreement under which Altech would not enter or compete in the pay-TV market dominated by MultiChoice. The Commission, in a media statement dated 4 May 2026, says the arrangement amounts to dividing markets by allocating suppliers and specific goods or services — a per se contravention of section 4(1)(b)(ii) of the Competition Act 89 of 1998. It is asking the Tribunal to impose administrative penalties of up to 10% of each company's annual turnover.
The case for prosecuting is strong
Let us start by steelmanning the regulator, because the underlying conduct, if proven, is exactly what competition law exists to stop. Market allocation between a dominant buyer and its key supplier is among the most damaging forms of collusion. Altech UEC manufactured the decoders MultiChoice needed; if a supplier with the technical capability to launch a rival pay-TV service was instead paid or persuaded to stay out, the agreement removed a credible entrant before it could discipline DStv's pricing. South Africa's pay-TV market has been a near-monopoly for two decades, and consumers have paid for it. A regulator that ignored a horizontal market-division clause simply because it was buried in a supply contract would be failing its mandate.
The context makes the allegation more pointed, not less. 2014 was the height of South Africa's botched digital terrestrial migration — the years-long fight over whether government-subsidised set-top boxes should support encryption. MultiChoice publicly campaigned against control/encryption in the state-backed boxes, a position critics argued was designed to protect its dominance against free-to-air competition. A side deal neutralising a decoder manufacturer as a potential pay-TV rival would fit that pattern. So the Commission is right to pursue this, and right to treat market division as serious.
Where proportionality concerns begin
The difficulty is not whether to enforce, but the staleness of this enforcement and what the remedy actually achieves. The agreement the Commission is prosecuting was reached in February 2014 and, on MultiChoice's account, ended in 2015. The referral landed in 2026 — roughly twelve years after the conduct began. In that interval the corporate reality has been remade twice over.
- Altron sold the Altech UEC decoder business to Skyblu Technologies, controlled by China's Shenzhen Skyworth Digital, back in 2019.
- MultiChoice was acquired by France's Groupe Canal+ in a deal the same Competition Commission recommended for approval in May 2025 and the Tribunal conditionally cleared in July 2025; MultiChoice delisted from the JSE in December 2025.
A penalty of up to 10% of turnover — estimated by The Citizen at a minimum of around R4 billion for MultiChoice alone — would therefore be paid largely by shareholders and owners who had nothing to do with a 2014 decision. Canal+ bought MultiChoice with this complaint already in the regulator's pipeline; Skyworth bought a decoder unit whose alleged sins predate its ownership. Deterrence works by making the people who weigh a cartel decision fear the consequence. When the consequence arrives a decade later and lands on successors, the deterrent signal to today's boardrooms is diluted: the lesson executives draw is less "don't collude" than "collusion is a problem for whoever owns the company in 2038."
There is also a substantive question the Tribunal will have to weigh. MultiChoice and Altech were not classic head-to-head competitors; they were a buyer and its supplier in a vertical relationship. The Commission's theory is that Altech was a potential horizontal competitor in pay-TV and the clause carved that possibility out. That may well be correct — but per se treatment under section 4(1)(b) is meant for naked horizontal cartels, where no efficiency justification is even entertained. Where the conduct sits inside a genuine supply agreement, a proportionate analysis should test whether Altech realistically would have, and could have, entered pay-TV at all. MultiChoice says it "firmly denies any breach," framing the clause as an ordinary term of a historical supply deal; Altron says it cooperated fully and welcomes the Tribunal process. Those defences deserve a real hearing, not a presumption.
The fix is faster enforcement, not weaker enforcement
None of this is an argument for letting cartels off. It is an argument that South African competition enforcement should move at the speed of the markets it polices. The deterrent value of a penalty decays sharply with delay, and a system that routinely prosecutes conduct a decade after the fact invites exactly the ownership-mismatch and evidentiary-staleness problems on display here. A pro-innovation competition regime is one that intervenes early enough to reopen a market while entry is still possible — not one that arrives after the entrant has been sold to a foreign buyer and the disputed boxes are obsolete.
The Tribunal should hear this case on its merits, and if the market-division agreement is proven, sanction it. But the more useful reform sits upstream: resourcing the Commission to detect and refer horizontal carve-outs in years, not decades. For South African consumers who overpaid for pay-TV through the 2010s, a 2026 fine is justice of a sort — but it is no substitute for the competition they never got.