Please Call Me Inventor Nkosana Makate tells the Constitutional Court that Vodacom will not collapse if it pays him R9.4bn.
VODACOM insists that Please Call Me (PCM) inventor Nkosana Makate deserves nothing more than the R47 million offered to him.
The telecommunications giant told the Constitutional Court on Thursday, 21 November, that the decision made by its CEO, Shameel Joosub, in 2019 shouldn’t have been overturned by the Supreme Court of Appeal.
Vodacom is appealing this judgment.
Wim Trengove, representing the company, argued that Joosub had actually done Makate a favour because there’s no solid evidence that 27% of all return-calls were triggered by the PCM within the first hour.
“What Vodacom did, persistently, was to complain that the fundamentals of Mr Makate’s contentions are based on a dispute of facts. Mr Makate chose to take his chances to persuade the court to find in his favour despite those disputes. That was his decision. We submit he wrongly made,” said Trengove.
He told the court it was challenging to determine which calls are triggered by PCM.
Trengove used an example: if a mother sends a PCM message to be picked up after a school event, the need for the call would exist regardless of the PCM message.
“So, you cannot say that call is triggered by the PCM,” he said.
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Vodacom also expressed concerns about the impact the SCA order might have on its Black-economic empowerment partner, Yebo Yethu.
The nearly two-decade-long case began when Makate sent his first letter of demand in 2007. He pitched his idea of a method to “buzz” someone’s phone without airtime to a superior on 21 November 2000. This idea was refined into “Please Call Me,” which launched on the Vodacom network in January 2001.
His lawyer, Stuart Scott, told the court that Vodacom has profited billions from Makate’s idea without compensating him for his ingenious invention.
Makate seeks R9.4 billion from the revenue generated by PCM.
“It is opportunistic that Vodacom should seek to raise its ‘concern’ on the effect that the SCA’s order will have on its Black-economic empowerment partner, Yebo Yethu, when for the last 24 years Vodacom has attempted to escape paying a contractual debt to its contractual partner, Mr Makate, in a contract whose terms were proved in the trial court and those factual findings were not interfered with by this Court in its 2016 judgement,” he said.
Scott argued that Vodacom, a company now valued at R200 billion, is backed financially by an even larger entity from England, Vodafone’s 65% shareholding means it’s highly unlikely that the R9.4 billion payment would lead to Vodacom’s downfall.
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