It is all systems go for the listing of Prosus; the international assets of Naspers on the Amsterdam stock exchange next week. It is estimated that Prosus, which will include Naspers’ 31% stake in Chinese company Tencent should be valued at around $100bn. With the Amsterdam listing, the dominance of Naspers over the South African stock market is about to be reduced which Bloomberg regards as good news for a number of fund managers who are concerned about the tech giant’s weighting in the main local index. The remarkable success of Naspers reads like a business fairy tale; Koos Bekker’s single bet on a Chinese start-up company meant that Naspers could grow to mammoth proportions. As one analyst described it; Koos “threw a handful of spaghetti against the wall and while most pieces didn’t stick, one of the big fat pieces did stick.” Bekker has been described by journalists that have interviewed him as quiet. He is not an easy man to get an interview with and does not seem to like too much publicity unless you manage to track him down at Davos in Switzerland, like Alec Hogg did this year. The South African tech king as he has been described by the Financial Times is about to get a lot more publicity as he re-invents Naspers and hopes to turn it into an even bigger global success story. – Linda van Tilburg
By Thulasizwe Sithole
Next week Naspers will list its global internet empire in Amsterdam. The company’s former chief executive and chairman, Koos Bekker and his bet on Chinese company, Tencent, seen as “the world’s most successful” is likely to become the stuff of business legends. With a single bet of $32m in 2011 on Tencent; the company grew to $133bn and as it had outgrown the South African stock market; it is now ready for a European listing.
The Financial Times likens Bekker’s success to that of Richard II, saying, “it began with failure.” Earlier investments in Chinese start-ups did not succeed as Koos described it to journalist David Rowan, “we sat upon the floor and told sad stories of the death of kings.” But his fortune changed when he spotted the Shenzhen start-up that dominated China’s internet.
Rowan writes that Bekker had changed the destiny of the company on a previous occasion. When he joined Naspers in 1985, “it was seen in the business of selling hate for 70 years.” Naspers newspapers, Beeld, Burger and Volksblad were seen to be the official propaganda arm of the National Party. The vision and direction of Naspers was changed because of Koos’ bold move to bring subscription television to South Africa.
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South Africa arrived late in the TV business. When Bekker pitched the idea of subscription television to the country; the national party government had only allowed television a mere decade before. The Sky channel in Britain had not been launched by Rupert Murdoch in the UK. Both moguls followed the same pattern, using “pay-tv cash to be on the internet” with Bekker choosing Tencent and Murdoch betting on MySpace. As it turned out; Bekker is either the luckiest or “most prescient media mogul in history.”
Bekker opted to forfeit a salary, negotiating option grants for the 17 years that he served as the chief executive of the company. He regarded it as a high risk strategy saying he would not recommend it, but it meant that he now owns a large number of super voting shares – “these days the structure reassures Beijing that the Tencent stake remains in friendly hands.” Bekker became a dollar billionaire in 2013 and had since doubled his net worth.
Bekker used his gains to acquire not only Babylonstoren, the Boland farm where signs are also in Mandarin, apart from English and Afrikaans. He and his wife Karen have recently opened a British cider estate in Somerset which reminds of Babylonstoren. It is called the Newt and is built around a Georgian country house, Hadspen House.
Johannesburg’s stock exchange and government pension funds have been propped up by the Naspers share price. As the company with its South African roots starts seeking global investors, South Africa has been hit with xenophobic attacks and high-profile protests to highlight the high rate of murder and rape of women in the country. There is a “growing sense of malaise and lawlessness in an economy that is starved of growth.” The FT says Ramaphosa’s enemies in the ANC “may be gaining the upper hand.”
With Naspers seeking a global listing, pressure is growing on Naspers, which will own 73% of the new Dutch listed entity, not to rely so heavily on the success of the share price that is driven by Tencent to reward executives. Naspers says it is “listening to investors on pay issues.”
Koos Bekker was born in 1942, four years after the National Party when its apartheid policies took control of the country. His father farmed cattle and Koos went on to study law and literature in an era when Naspers failed to report on the injustices perpetrated by the NP in the apartheid era, adhering to the censorship rules of the rulers of the time.
During the 80s when South Africa went through turbulent times under PW Botha; Koos and Karen Bekker moved to New York. At that time, President Cyril Ramaphosa who was born just a month after Bekker, joined the liberation struggle. Bekker went on to graduate from Columbia University with an MBA and studied HBO which gave America pay-TV in 1972.
It was this that prompted Bekker to send a proposal to Naspers at a time when the company was threatened for advertising revenue by television. Naspers agreed and persuaded former President PW Botha to support their bid with the suggestion that his mouthpiece of the time would fold if he didn’t. In the post-apartheid era, many journalists and prominent editors asked forgiveness for their “complicity in a morally indefensible political regime.” One of Bekker’s former editors, Ferial Haffajee described Bekker as an “excellent media owner… a frustrated journalist who respected the newspapers’ independence.”
“The internet and pay-TV businesses were once known as the casino that paid for the Naspers cathedral, the newspapers and journalists. The house has long since won.” The success that Naspers achieved with the extraordinary rise of Tencent has enabled the company to invest in internet businesses around the world. With the listing in Amsterdam, the company will re-invent itself all over again. Koos Bekker ascribed the greatness of the group to good governance and excellent execution; “…it’s not the one of the other.”
