What This Business Has to Earn
This page used to set out proposed investor terms. It does something more useful now: it says what the business would have to earn before a return is worth discussing. Every figure is computed from the Phase 1 model on this site.
$147M
Year 10 Revenue to Stop Burning Cash
$838M
Year 10 Revenue to Return the Capital
$1.36B
Year 10 Revenue for a 12% Return
Where It Stands Today
Capital required: $646.2M for Phase 1, land to turnkey plus every year of ramp-up losses. Called as the campus is built, not banked on day one.
Year 10 revenue: $40.9M. MwindaTV $25.0M, the academies $10.5M, Multimedia Productions $5.3M.
Year 10 EBITDA: Negative $30.9M. The business does not cover its own running costs in its best modelled year.
Return: None. Free cash flow is negative in all ten years, so no discount rate breaks even and no rate of return exists to quote.
Why This Page Changed
The earlier version promised 2.2 to 2.8 times capital and 11 to 13 percent a year on a $95M raise. The raise is now $646.2M, because independent reviews found costs the model had never carried: VAT on the construction contract, the DRC Labour Code obligations, the expatriate tax, insurance sized to the real asset, and the running cost of everything the budget had bought and never staffed. Re-cutting the old promise against the new number would produce a smaller promise nobody could stand behind. So the page inverts. It states the hurdle instead of the reward, and every line of it can be defended.
What Would Have to Change
The gap is not a rounding error and it is not closed by trimming costs. To stop burning cash the business needs about three and a half times the revenue, which is a business plan. To give an investor a commercial return it needs about thirty-three times more, and that is a different company. The clearest way to see the size of it: MwindaTV is modelled at 1.3 million paying subscribers by Year 10. A 12 percent return needs about 43 million. Showmax reached roughly 2.1 million across the whole continent, with DStv distribution behind it, and Canal+ closed it in April 2026.
What This Does Not Say
- •It does not say the revenue is unreachable. It says what it would be, so a reader can judge that for themselves.
- •It does not assume any cost is wrong. Every figure in the budget is at the low end of what a reviewer proposed, or the midpoint where nobody has priced it yet.
- •It does not count the upside published on the Investor Metrics tab: B2B content licensing, an ad-supported tier, or recovery of the $44.7M of construction VAT the model funds and does not claim back.
- •It does not include a terminal value. The model values the business at nothing on the last day of Year 10, which no buyer would.
- •It is not the whole project. Phases 2 and 3 have not been through this costing, and the public venues are a separate raise on a separate structure.
The Hurdles, in Order
Year 10 revenue required, against $40.9M as modelled. Costs are recomputed at each level. Everything that varies with revenue moves with it: marketing, the cost of producing content, delivery to each subscriber, payment fees, and the agent and player share of every transfer fee. Streaming content scales but never below its floor, because a catalogue costs what it costs. Genuinely fixed cost stays fixed.
Computed by model/scenario_required_revenue.py against the same Phase 1 model that produces every other figure on this site, using the same revenue-scaling function as the published sensitivity analysis. Multiples are solved by bisection because the cost side is not linear in revenue: the streaming content floor binds at low revenue and releases at high revenue, and the 1% minimum turnover tax applies in exactly the years the 30% profits rate does not. All cases are unlevered and all-equity, since no senior debt clears a 1.30x coverage test at any point in the forecast.