UPTURNING ECONOMICS
The new economics of Naspers
Under pressure to reduce Naspers’s gargantuan size, Koos Bekker argues that obsession with regulation is wrong-headed in the Internet world because competition is global — and size matters
The gospel according to the 21st-century Naspers contradicts much of the conventional business wisdom lesser companies still live by. To hear chairman Koos Bekker or CEO Bob van Dijk tell it, Naspers exists in a world where monster-sized monopolies are a fact of doing business, corporate governance may just be a luxury for when you’re "winning" and making jaw-crunching losses can be a route to market dominance. It’s a far cry from the Naspers of 1915, whose first product, newspaper De Burger, only had to worry about competing with the Sunday Times. Now with print media on the canvas, Bekker says: "Naspers competes against the likes of Google, Facebook and Amazon — all many times our scale." And size is everything. "The big guys grow faster than the small guys — it’s strange to relate but that’s the truth and it’s scary to be a lonely guy out there," he says. The problem is that the regulators who typically exist in individual countries and obsess about breaking up monopolies don’t u...
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