Naspers CEO Bob van Dijk has ‘clunky’ Craigslist in his sights
AFRICA’s biggest company is also is one of its least known outside the continent, and it owes its fortune to one great investment: China.Naspers, which has transformed itself from a local publisher to a media juggernaut valued at $76.5bn, invested $34m in 2001 to take a stake in Tencent Holdings, now China’s largest and most popular internet-service portal with nearly a billion instant-messenger active users every month and market capitalisation of $256.7bn. The 34% Naspers stake is currently worth more than Naspers itself.Now the media company is pushing into the US and hoping to topple a household name, Craigslist.In May, Naspers opened a venture-capital outfit in San Francisco to be closer to the tech-innovation hub of Silicon Valley and get early access to technology and internet companies it can help to scale on a global basis. That followed a $100m investment last year in a mobile-classifieds app called Letgo.The company wants to replicate successes in online classified platfo...
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