In between engagements with investors and coping with demands of global media, Naspers CEO Bob van Dijk connected with me yesterday to explain a headline grabbing decision to list the group’s offshore assets in Amsterdam.
It was a complex deal, Van Dijk shared, requiring the permission of the SA Reserve Bank and the JSE. There will be a secondary listing of “NewCo” in Johannesburg. it will be the third most valuable share on Euronext and Europe’s biggest internet stock, projected to be worth comfortably more than $100bn.
South Africans should also be celebrating. The transaction will generate a juicy R1bn in share transfer tax for the SA Treasury. More important, though, is the impact on national wealth.
Naspers is comfortably the biggest share in SA retirement portfolios, carrying a weighting of 25% in the JSE’s SWIX index. The shares trade at a 40% discount to the underlying assets. So any contraction in that margin, likely now as foreigners will have a global entry point, will be a direct boost to the asset base of millions of South Africans.
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