COMPANY COMMENT: Chinese status quo is good news for Naspers
Chinese politics and the rand’s exchange rates are the main influences on Naspers’s share price
Consider what might happen to Naspers and Tencent, the media behemoth’s single most valuable asset, if the Chinese government decided to remove its ban on Google, Twitter and Facebook.In the absence of any serious competition, Tencent, which is 34% owned by Naspers, has made a fortune by providing its own version of these services to the vast Chinese market. Chinese politics and the rand’s exchange rates are the main influences on Naspers’s share price. And now it looks as though it could scoop up a bit more business from the Chinese government’s obsession with controlling the population. The government’s latest move, a crackdown on children’s literature, is designed to protect Chinese from an "ideology inflow". On Friday, Taobao, the Alibaba-owned e-commerce site, decided to take the move one huge step further. It announced it would be blocking sales not just of foreign books (including Harry Potter) but also comic books, DVDs, CDs and video games. Video game sellers are apparently...
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