COMPANY COMMENT: Investment in Naspers comes with China risk
Naspers has become, more than ever, a proxy for its 34% holding in Chinese gaming and messaging outfit Tencent
Is there anything that can cut Naspers down to size? As fund managers increasingly worry about concentration risk, mostly to passive investors, Naspers keeps on racking up records, firming to more than R2,800 this week, with R3,000 seemingly close.Naspers already makes up 15% of the JSE’s all share, delivering more than half the index’s growth for the year so far. It is trading at a p:e of 101 and is up 40% in 2017. Naspers has become, more than ever, a proxy for its 34% holding in Chinese gaming and messaging outfit Tencent, which is set to grow its activities further behind a wall of Chinese state regulatory control, meaning Naspers could become a captive cash cow beneficiary for years to come. Naspers’s other interests count for little and, without Tencent, it would probably be a lower-order company on the top 40. At this stage, probably only an implosion in the Chinese economy would bring Naspers down to more realistic levels. Bank of America Merrill Lynch said this week that Ch...
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