EDITORIAL: An elephant in Naspers’s room
Naspers’s stand-alone worth outside of Chinese internet giant Tencent has come to a head around the salary of CEO Bob van Dyk
Naspers is really one of the great marvels of South African business. Quite how a small, predominantly Afrikaans newspaper company could emerge as global technology player operating in more than 120 countries is truly extraordinary. Naspers is now the world’s seventh-largest internet company and has a market capitalisation of R1.2-trillion. Yes, trillion. A lot of credit goes to adept, insightful and courageous former CEOs: Ton Vosloo and Koos Bekker. Yet now Naspers finds itself at an odd juncture. As market watchers know, the company’s investment in the Chinese internet company Tencent has exploded. That would be manna from heaven if not for one uncomfortable fact: Naspers’s stake in Tencent is now worth more than the market capitalisation of Naspers itself, and not just by a little bit. This "conglomerate discount" now stands at around 27% — and widening. Effectively, the market is saying — according to one interpretation of market valuation — that not only is Naspers’s own busin...
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