Naspers Ltd chief executive officer Bob van Dijk said five years of heavy e-commerce investments are bearing fruit, which should prove to investors that the assets are worth more than they think.
Van Dijk is seeking to show shareholders that Africa’s largest company by market value has more to offer than just its well-timed investment in Chinese Internet giant Tencent Holdings Ltd (騰訊).
Cape Town-based Naspers has ridden the coattails of the WeChat (微信) creator to be the best performer on Johannesburg’s FTSE/JSE Africa Top 40 Index this year with a 50 percent rise.
The catch is that the market values the 33 percent stake in the Shenzhen-based company at almost US$32 billion more than Naspers as a whole.
Outflows of South African capital since late 2015 have contributed to the widening disparity, Van Dijk said.
The value gap will start to close as Naspers’ classified-advertising division, which includes Russia’s Avito, turns profitable in the current fiscal year, he said.
The services unit of payment business PayU is close to breaking even, and Polish e-commerce platform eMAG is starting to benefit from a large customer base.
The companies are part of Naspers’ e-commerce unit, which recorded a loss of US$682 million for the 12 months that ended in March, leaving out interest, tax, depreciation and amortization.
“We are excited about a business like eMAG turning profitable,” Van Dijk said in an interview on Friday. “That will be a catalyst to recognizing the value of our other assets.”
Van Dijk’s main priority in the short term will be on expanding Naspers’ companies to reach broader audiences and using technology to improve customers’ experience.
“We have a big team that looks at using artificial intelligence in our classified platforms to eliminate spam ads, for instance,” he said.
Earlier at the company’s annual meeting in Cape Town, chairman Koos Bekker countered criticism that Naspers relies too heavily on its US$132 billion stake in Tencent.
He reminded investors that they would have been a lot poorer if he had given in to similar pressure to sell the holding years ago.
Tencent shares have risen more than sixfold in the past five years, closing on Friday at HK$328.40, as the company’s services have become an integral part of Chinese life.
“Five years ago there was also a lot of unhappiness,” Bekker told shareholders. “If we had sold then, you would have gotten HK$45, now you get HK$325. We are not married to the share, but at this point in time it’s paying shareholders.”
Bekker said that the assumption that Tencent is making money and Naspers’ other ventures are loss-making was “illiterate,” since profitability does not accurately capture the value of the businesses.
PERSISTENT RUMORS: Nvidia’s CEO said the firm is not in talks to sell AI chips to China, but he would welcome a change in US policy barring the activity Nvidia Corp CEO Jensen Huang (黃仁勳) said his company is not in discussions to sell its Blackwell artificial intelligence (AI) chips to Chinese firms, waving off speculation it is trying to engineer a return to the world’s largest semiconductor market. Huang, who arrived in Taiwan yesterday ahead of meetings with longtime partner Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), took the opportunity to clarify recent comments about the US-China AI race. The Nvidia head caused a stir in an interview this week with the Financial Times, in which he was quoted as saying “China will win” the AI race. Huang yesterday said
Nissan Motor Co has agreed to sell its global headquarters in Yokohama for ￥97 billion (US$630 million) to a group sponsored by Taiwanese autoparts maker Minth Group (敏實集團), as the struggling automaker seeks to shore up its financial position. The acquisition is led by a special purchase company managed by KJR Management Ltd, a Japanese real-estate unit of private equity giant KKR & Co, people familiar with the matter said. KJR said it would act as asset manager together with Mizuho Real Estate Management Co. Nissan is undergoing a broad cost-cutting campaign by eliminating jobs and shuttering plants as it grapples
The Chinese government has issued guidance requiring new data center projects that have received any state funds to only use domestically made artificial intelligence (AI) chips, two sources familiar with the matter told Reuters. In recent weeks, Chinese regulatory authorities have ordered such data centers that are less than 30 percent complete to remove all installed foreign chips, or cancel plans to purchase them, while projects in a more advanced stage would be decided on a case-by-case basis, the sources said. The move could represent one of China’s most aggressive steps yet to eliminate foreign technology from its critical infrastructure amid a
MORE WEIGHT: The national weighting was raised in one index while holding steady in two others, while several companies rose or fell in prominence MSCI Inc, a global index provider, has raised Taiwan’s weighting in one of its major indices and left the country’s weighting unchanged in two other indices after a regular index review. In a statement released on Thursday, MSCI said it has upgraded Taiwan’s weighting in the MSCI All-Country World Index by 0.02 percentage points to 2.25 percent, while maintaining the weighting in the MSCI Emerging Markets Index, the most closely watched by foreign institutional investors, at 20.46 percent. Additionally, the index provider has left Taiwan’s weighting in the MSCI All-Country Asia ex-Japan Index unchanged at 23.15 percent. The latest index adjustments are to
RSS