By selling a tiny piece of its stake in Tencent, Naspers is hardly switching horses
Investors essentially value Naspers’s Tencent stake at a discount and its other holdings at less than zero
Hong Kong — Great stocks are like thoroughbreds: keep the best horse hidden for too long and people discount the value of your stable. Something similar seems to have happened with Naspers and its star asset, Tencent Holdings. And it helps to explain why Naspers decided to shed some of its stake in the Chinese social media giant. On Thursday, Naspers said it would sell as much as 190-million Tencent shares, equal to 2% of Tencent’s total issued share capital, cutting its holdings to 31.2%. It’s promised not to sell more shares in the next three years. The sale was Naspers’s first disposal since it had the smarts to invest in Tencent as far back as in 2001, when the Chinese firm was an obscure internet company. Since then, Tencent — operator of the popular WeChat messaging service — has soared in value. As of Thursday’s close, Naspers’s 33% stake in Tencent alone was worth more than $175bn, eclipsing Naspers’s own entire market cap of $121bn. In other words, investors essentially val...
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