COMPANY COMMENT: Hard to fathom rises and falls of Naspers
It’s almost impossible to know on any day what causes the Naspers share price to surge or slump
It’s almost impossible to know on any day what causes the Naspers share price to surge or slump. And it’s also almost impossible to know precisely what value is being ascribed to what bits of Naspers. Recent comments suggest that Naspers is destroying value in its non-Tencent operations because its 34% stake in Tencent is worth about 130% of Naspers’s market capitalisation.But this view doesn’t seem to allow for the possibility that Naspers shareholders aren’t attributing full value to the Tencent holding rather than attributing a substantial negative value to the media, Multichoice and eCommerce operations. Given the unusual circumstances surrounding the Tencent investment, chiefly that it is held through a Hong Kong-based variable interest entity (VIE), it is possible that Naspers’s shareholders are reluctant to attribute full value to its Tencent stake. This reluctance would seem appropriate, given also that Naspers’s claim on Tencent faces some limitation. The VIE structure, whi...
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