Pick of the Month: Naspers
What is the rationale behind the new listing, and how will it affect current shareholders?
A lot has changed at Naspers over the past few months. The company has started taking steps to unlock value for its shareholders by unbundling the MultiChoice operation in a separate listing — concentrating Naspers as an online consumer business — and it has recently announced plans to restructure itself somewhat in order to list on the Euronext exchange in Amsterdam. The restructuring transaction is not cheap, having a price tag of $140m. But management believes it will "unlock" a lot more value than that. What is the rationale behind this new listing, and how will it affect current shareholders? In a nutshell, management believes that because Naspers’s market capitalisation is so large, the stock is too big for the SA market. The company believes that due to its already huge index weighting in our market and the subsequently large allocation in both active and passive funds, most institutional investors essentially become forced sellers as the share price rises, so that their port...
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