THE MINORITY REPORT

You won’t struggle to find people who believe Naspers is a stock to leap into right now. But Investec’s Sumesh Chetty isn’t one of them

There were some gasps in the audience at the Allan Gray Investment Summit last week when Investec portfolio manager Sumesh Chetty declared that, contrary to just about anyone you’ll bump into in Claremont or Sandton, his funds hold not a single share in tech giant Naspers.

Chetty compounded the heresy, adding: “Nor will you find us buying any Naspers shares now, at

R2,900 each.”

In investment terms, it’s a doozy of a minority report. All 16 analysts who cover Naspers rate it a “buy”, expecting, on average, the price to rise by about 30% next year to reach R3,742/share.

Shunning Naspers at this point seems a bit like saying you’ll stick with your Telkom landline and have no truck with this newfangled cellphone rubbish. Or that this e-mail fad will never really catch on.

But Chetty (41) is no mug. He’s a fellow of the UK Institute of Actuaries, has worked at a number of bluechip firms, including Metropolitan and Swiss Re, and has spent a decade at Investec.

This isn’t a decision he’s taken lightly. Still, it must be an increasingly hard decision to justify, when your clients see Naspers’s stock soaring 43% this year (the most of all JSE companies worth more than R10bn) and you’ve told them you know better.

“We’ve received less flak than you would have expected,” Chetty said this week. “Our clients have a very clear understanding of what we want to achieve

. . . we don’t hold MTN, we don’t hold Anglo American, we don’t hold BHP Billiton.”

Instead, the funds he manages include companies

Shunning Naspers seems a bit like saying you’ll stick with your landline and have no truck with this newfangled cellphone rubbish