Tilting at windmills
ROB ROSE: Some rather awkward questions for Naspers
An obscure Swiss money manager has emerged from nowhere to rudely interrupt Bob van Dijk’s charmed three-year honeymoon as CEO of SA’s largest company, Naspers
It has taken a Swiss investment adviser named Albert Saporta (56) to rudely interrupt Bob van Dijk’s charmed three-year honeymoon as CEO of SA’s largest company, Naspers. Over the past three years, Naspers’s stock has soared 104% — leagues above the 0.34% gain in the JSE all share in that time. The only problem, as Saporta wrote in an open letter to Van Dijk last week, is that Naspers’s meteoric rise was entirely due to Koos Bekker’s smartest (or luckiest) investment — a 33% stake in the Hong Kong-listed Tencent, which owns Chinese social media sensation WeChat. Over those three years, Tencent’s stock soared even faster than Naspers’s, growing 120%. The result: the entire Naspers is valued today at $88bn (R1.14 trillion), while just its 33% of Tencent is worth $116bn (R1.5 trillion). This means, says Saporta, that the market places a negative R300bn value on the rest of Naspers’s business — including MultiChoice, classified website OLX and Flipkart. “In the past three years, R334bn ...
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