Bekker wants more than Tencent
BILLIONAIRE Koos Bekker has spent 15 years riding the rocket of the Chinese internet thanks to one really smart – or really lucky – investment. Now he is trying to do it again.
In 2001 Naspers, the media group he chairs, put $32 million (R382m) into a then-obscure web company called Tencent. Its stake today is worth $66 billion – roughly equal to Naspers’ entire stock market capitalisation. To prove he is capable of more successes like Tencent, Bekker is scouring the globe in search of new tech deals.
“What we’ve done over the years is take huge risks,” Bekker said. The task now, he said, was “to find the countries where the gaps still exist because in many countries the good opportunities have been taken”.
Bekker is seeking to prove that Naspers is more than a giant venture-capital fund built on a single grand-slam investment. The markets accord little to no value to the company’s other businesses, including Africa’s largest pay-TV network and investments in dozens of other start-ups.
Sabbatical
A year ago, Bekker stepped down from running Naspers for a year-long “sabbatical” that took him to Shanghai, Seoul, San Francisco and elsewhere in search of new ideas.
He says the time away convinced him that the firm needs to double down on e-commerce in developing countries – even though there is a lot more money chasing emerging market internet deals today, and brutal competition both from locals and US giants like Amazon.com.
Naspers is almost unrecognisable from the company Bekker took over as chief executive in 1997. At the time, it was called Die Nasionale Pers, or The National Press, and was principally known as the publisher of Die Burger, an Afrikaans-language daily that was a staunch defender of apartheid.
Though the editorial line has changed, Naspers still publishes the paper.
Bekker now serves as chair- man and has given the chief executive job to former eBay executive Bob Van Dijk.
Using cash from the pay-TV division, which was founded in the 1980s, Bekker started plowing funds into more than 100 technology businesses around the world.
Most of those bets bled money: Online retailers in Africa had to be shut down, and the company took an $80m loss on a Chinese internet service provider.
When Naspers bought half of Tencent in 2001 (since diluted to 34 percent), the Chinese firm was a fledgling player in a country with minimal internet use.
Today more than a billion people use Tencent’s messaging services, such as WeChat.
On May 13, the company reported record profits from its vast range of online businesses. A deal with Russian portal Mail.ru Group was another win, albeit less spectacular. Naspers bought 30 percent in 2007 for $165m; its current 29 percent holding is valued at about $1.6bn, though the shares have fallen by almost a third since the start of the Ukraine crisis.
Naspers is Africa’s biggest company by market capitalisation, worth about $66bn. Its shares have climbed more than 500 percent since 2010, thanks largely to Tencent, growth that has allowed its chairman to acquire some of the trappings of tech super-wealth.
Bekker is now worth about $2.5bn according to the Bloomberg Billionaires index, and he and his wife spend much of their time at Babylonstoren, a sprawling farm and luxury hotel they own in the Bekker said the epiphany of his working holiday – which made him more determined to stick to his strategy – came after he gave a lecture on entrepreneurship at China’s Nanjing University.
The moment he finished, Bekker was “absolutely stormed by people with pitches”, he recalled.
“One guy will say, ‘give me one minute to just explain my concept,’ another one will say ‘here’s my paper, its three pages, please read it,’ so you feel absolutely enormous ambition,” Bekker said.
His vision is for Naspers to become a leading e-commerce presence in places that American tech giants have not yet focused on. – Bloomberg