Investors turn from the Naspers jalopy to a sexier ride in Prosus
Now that Naspers has shed its sexiest bits, given them a Dutch accent, and put them in Prosus, the company looks somewhat like the printdriven jalopy of 40 years ago.
Naspers was heading that way after MultiChoice got its own JSE listing in February, but these days you have to lift the bonnet, fiddle with a few wires and maybe hit it with a spanner to see what makes it tick.
It was no surprise that most Naspers shareholders wanted to receive Prosus shares after the Amsterdam listing, rather than more Naspers shares as compensation for the split. Global consumer internet investments that include a 31% chunk of the golden goose Tencent, held under the Prosus umbrella, are more alluring than the rump of the Naspers operation that remains in SA.
Naspers holds about 74% of Prosus, so as a JSE shareholder in the SA media company you still get plenty of offshore exposure. But what else do you get?
In an interview with the Naspers house organ Fin24, the company’s CEO in SA, Phuti Mahanyele-Dabengwa, said internet-based businesses were the main focus.
She gave the example of SweepSouth as “one example of many great business solutions in which Naspers saw great potential”. SweepSouth, she explained, is a service that allows users to find reliable home cleaners, using mobile tech. Righto, then.
In the 1980s a terrible fiction got passed around the tables of the frightfully blameless English-speaking middle class, out of earshot of the servants of course. It concerned the National Party. Ooh, someone would say, those Cape Nats are not like the other lot, you know. As if there were gradations of evil when it came to apartheid.
(“That nice Mr Hess”or ) Mr Speer, at least you can talk to them. Not like the dreadful Mr Bormann, oh my heavens, or that Himmler creature.
Anyway, that whitewashed world of the benign Cape Nat was Nasionale Pers country. The bosses were quite personable, as I remember; the click of the jackboots reserved for private moments, perhaps.
MD “Lang” Dawid de Villiers was a patrician, liberal-leaning advocate. Set aside his qualms about working in the service of the party of Magnus Malan and Jimmy Kruger, and you might also forgive a Rhodes graduate called up as a foot soldier of the volk to write about pop music for Fair Lady in 1982. (“Just following orders, I swear.”)
Somewhere in that building on the Foreshore was a bloke named Koos Bekker, who had a plan for pay-TV that would transform media in SA. But in the early 1980s, before M-Net, Naspers literally printed money.
Die Burger parroted the party line and kept the presses running (as did Beeld and Rapport up north), while an altogether less politicised machine hissed and whirred in the background. This was the magazine business.
Huisgenoot, under Niel Hammann, sold half a million copies a week. Sarie and Fair Lady, fortnightly in those days, regularly ran editions of more than 500 pages. It required a great many words, copy written not in service of our great fascist overlords in Pretoria but in the name of royalty, celebrity and showbiz.
And so every two weeks we put these monster editions together. Barbara Barnard and sundry beauty queens (Margaret Gardiner, Anneline Kriel) held down the local angle, while Princess Michael of Kent and Queen Noor of Jordan inexplicably had their mugs stuck on the front of Fair Lady every couple of months. Lady Di would come as a godsend.
It was all very mumsy and innocuous, but occasionally Lang Dawid would waft down to the sixth floor to chide Jane Raphaely. Among the reams of flimflam, someone must have slipped in something seditious like a polite word or two about Helen Suzman.
All those Naspers newspapers and magazines are still around today, in reduced form, along with the online News24 operation, plus a couple of other things bolted on. But given the hyperlink to new worlds provided by Prosus, you can forgive shareholders for losing interest in old-school Naspers.
GIVEN THE PROSUS HYPERLINK TO NEW WORLDS, YOU CAN FORGIVE SHAREHOLDERS FOR LOSING INTEREST IN OLD NASPERS