The man who helped pioneer media giant Naspers’s online expansion, Antonie Roux, passed away in a hospital in Germany in Sunday after undergoing surgery. He was 54.
Roux, who was a former CEO of Internet service provider MWeb, joined the Naspers group as a junior technician in 1979 and was a founding member of pay-TV operator M-Net in 1985. In 2002, he was appointed as CEO of the group’s Internet operations before being named CEO of the MIH group, which holds Naspers’s pay-TV and Internet assets, in April 2011.
On Roux’s watch, Naspers rapidly built a global Internet business focused on emerging markets, taking investments in Mail.ru in Russia, Tencent in China and Allegro in Poland.
Roux, who was regarded as a potential successor to Naspers CEO Koos Bekker, reportedly had pancreatic cancer. — (c) 2012 NewsCentral Media