JAMIE CARR: Trans Hex digs a deeper hole
Trans Hex is suffering from the fundamental problem of a mining company: if you keep extracting from a finite resource it will eventually run out
Analysts with a sceptical take on the Naspers story would do well to remember the story of Cassandra, princess of Troy, who made the deep strategic error of backing out of a promise to indulge in sex with the god Apollo. As a result she had the gift of prophecy, but was cursed so that nobody would believe a word she said. This may well be a familiar feeling for those who have been saying Naspers is over-priced as it continues to get ever more expensive. The other accusation that has been hurled in Naspers’s general direction is that it’s a one-trick pony that lucked into an investment in Tencent. While it’s true that you’d have had to be a mighty effective fortune teller to predict the extraordinary growth that Tencent has achieved, Naspers’s results show that it has been deploying the bounty that Tencent spews out into a number of interesting areas. Tencent continues to power on, and Naspers took the opportunity to offload a 2% slice of the company for a solid US$9.8bn in the perio...
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