Is Naspers finally done burning through cash?
For more than a decade, Naspers seems to have stuck to a confused — and confusing — corporate strategy: questionable investments, add-ons, write-offs, a crazily complicated cross-holding and the unwinding of that cross-holding. It may have seemed awfully haphazard, but the end result is actually quite elegant
07 December 2023 - 05:00
Naspers has, for years now, looked like a wholly inelegant swan. Rather than gliding gracefully through the corporate world, it has paddled furiously from one clumsy transaction to another.
Normally, you’d write this off to just another confused corporate strategy. Only, in the case of Naspers, it has so much more meaning given that it and Prosus — the company it spun out in 2019 — have a combined market value of R2.7-trillion. It is, by some distance, the largest local company on the JSE, and a staple in almost every pension fund. In other words, when Naspers dives, so do most retirement savings pools...
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