nooit, china!
Koos Bekker's Tencent dilemma: a victim of its own success?
Whether he has been incredibly lucky or is a visionary who sees technological trends, Naspers boss Koos Bekker (who did, after all, start M-Net and MTN) managed to pick "the best investment ever in the world" when he invested in Chinese tech giant Tencent in 2001. Yet critics are raising awkward questions about Naspers’s true value minus its stake in Tencent, and asking its executives to justify their pay increases
It’s not often that the chairman of a company — even if it’s Africa’s largest, worth R1.3 trillion — gets to call critics, including SA’s top fund managers, "economically illiterate" to their face. But Naspers chair Koos Bekker (64), fêted as either the world’s savviest entrepreneur or the luckiest, was in a fighting mood at his company’s standing-room-only AGM in Cape Town last week. Something had to give. For weeks Bekker and CEO Bob van Dijk had been goaded by shareholders, including august money-manager Allan Gray, over two thorny issues. First, it had become clear that Naspers’s rip-roaring 34% stake in Chinese social media giant Tencent has become the tail that wags the dog. Tencent has become so phenomenally successful that Naspers’s minority stake is now worth R1.7 trillion — more than Naspers itself, which is valued at R1.3 trillion.But at the AGM, Bekker, all smiles with a touch of venom, tore into critics. Deriding them as "short-term thinkers", he dismissed their call to...
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