![]() Instead, they found each other out of a combination of desperation and conviction that ended up rescuing each side from total failure. Naspers did not find Tencent, nor did Tencent find Naspers. The Naspers-Tencent story is no different. ![]() The reality is always more messy and haphazard, less straightforward and inspirational. Most famous investment stories are told either through the lens of an astute investor, who found a diamond in the rough due to his keen intuition, or the eyes of a tenacious founder, who convinced a powerful investor through his world-changing vision and grit. As of today, Naspers holds 42% of Prosus. So 105 years after Naspers’s founding (and 18 years after its “marriage” with Tencent), it gave birth to Prosus – its global technology investment “baby”. Why list there? Likely because the Dutch has had a long history of doing international businesses, thus its exchange is more experienced in working with the cross-border accounting, taxation, and other corporate finance complexities that Prosus’s portfolio uniquely needs. In 2019, it decided to spin out that portfolio into a separate entity called Prosus (the Latin word for “forward”) and listed it on the Euronext Amsterdam stock exchange in the Netherlands. A few years later, under Koos Bekker’s leadership (who became CEO in 1997), Naspers sold the European portion of its paid TV business for roughly $2.2 billion dollars – seeding its war chest to expand into China, Russia, and other emerging markets at the dawn of the Internet.Īfter two decades of technology investing, including China’s Tencent and Russia’s VK (formerly known as Group), Naspers amassed a huge portfolio of tech companies that spanned across the world. In 1994, it became a public company on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange (where its shares still trade today). In the 1980s and 1990s, Naspers successfully expanded into both telecom and the paid TV business. ![]() It first started as a publishing company, grew throughout the 20th century, and played a significant role in South Africa’s complicated history, including a controversial alignment with the country’s Nationalist Party that implemented apartheid. Naspers is a South African media conglomerate founded in 1914. So before we get to the heart of the story, let’s first briefly explain the corporate history and relationship of Naspers and Prosus. Naspers? Prosus? South African? Dutch? Who? One of the reasons why this story has been hard to tell is that the investor’s history, brand, and identity is kind of confusing.
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