Tencent’s biggest investor Naspers to spin off 31 per cent stake to form Europe’s largest listed consumer internet group
- Naspers, Africa’s largest company, owns Tencent shares valued about US$133 billion
Naspers plans to carve out its internet businesses, including a US$133-billion stake in China’s Tencent Holdings that has long exceeded the South African technology investor’s own market value.
Cape Town-based Naspers chose Euronext Amsterdam to list a business that includes its 31 per cent holding in Hong Kong-traded Tencent, which runs the world’s biggest video games business by revenue and China’s largest social media operation, as well as investments in Russian internet platform Mail.Ru, German food delivery business Delivery Hero and Indian online food delivery start-up Swiggy.
The listing, meant to attract international investors, is part of chief executive Bob Van Dijk’s effort to reduce the gap between Nasper’s market value of about 1.41 trillion rand (US$97.9 billion) and its Tencent stake.
Naspers has been considering listings other than its primary one in the Johannesburg Stock Exchange (JSE), which some investors have encouraged.
Naspers, Africa’s largest company, accounts for about 25 per cent of the JSE’s weighting. It has seen its value ebb and flow with the holding limits of South African institutional investors and emerging market sentiment.
“When the transaction is complete about a quarter of the Naspers market value will have moved from the JSE,” Van Dijk said in a phone interview.
Naspers dropped 0.5 per cent as of 10:30am in Johannesburg. Shares of Tencent were down 3 per cent.
The listing is a “judicious move to a larger pool of capital”, John Davies, an analyst at Bloomberg Intelligence, wrote in a note. Naspers still needs to demonstrate a track record of investment success, Davies said.
Naspers got its start just over a century ago as a newspaper publisher focused on providing the first Afrikaans-language press. The company has since evolved into one of the world’s biggest tech investors. Its executives are based largely in the Netherlands and travel extensively, as they seek to replicate the Tencent bet.
Van Dijk said he chose Amsterdam partly because it is a “great place to attract talent”. The listing requirements are very similar to the JSE and the company can keep the same management and board. NewCo is expected to be the largest internet investment company on the Euronext and the third largest overall, he said.
Van Dijk this month spun out the company’s pay-television company MultiChoice, to focus Naspers entirely on consumer internet businesses.
