End of the Tencent honeymoon
Naspers’s big China play needs to switch focus to the real economy if it is to keep international investors sweet
Within a week of its bone-chilling slump to a five-year low of R1,500, the Naspers share price had recovered all its losses and added a little for good measure. Unsurprisingly, it took its direction from Tencent, which bounced back from its low of HK$316 with almost the same vigour that it had dropped.But the dramatic crash of mid-March has all the hallmarks of a honeymoon that is over. There were few new developments behind the extreme jitters that hit market sentiment. The US Securities & Exchange Commission’s tougher stance has been on the cards since a new law was introduced in 2020; the tougher regulatory regime in China was flagged all the way back in November 2020 when Alibaba was blocked from listing its finance business, Ant. The JPMorgan report last week that declared China to be "uninvestable" did little more than sum up what the market already knew.What was relatively new, or at least just a few weeks old, were concerns about how the war in Ukraine might affect China, wh...
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