COMPANY COMMENT: What became of Nats’ shares in Naspers?
The question about the former National Party's 74,000 Naspers shares is not an idle one
So, what happened to the 74,000 Naspers shares the National Party (NP) owned in 1984? Did some smart apparatchik hold onto the shares until the party was dissolved? Or were they sold when Naspers listed in 1994? Perhaps in 1994 the party’s financial guys thought that given Naspers’s prospects of surviving, let alone thriving, under the ANC they may as well get rid of them. Who would have thought 1994 would mark the beginning of Naspers’s good fortune? Whatever benefits it gained from working closely with the NP and helping to fund its elections were minuscule compared with what Naspers has become under the ANC government. Not only has it held on to a chunk of the school textbook business, it tightened its hold on a much larger and more profitable pay-television service. This growth would not have been possible under the NP. Remarkably, the ANC government has done nothing to challenge Naspers’s pay-TV monopoly. Similarly, it’s unlikely the Chinese government would have entertained th...
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