Naspers, Africa’s biggest company by market value, said it expects to report that full-year earnings rose as much as 20% when one-time items are excluded.
The “core headline” figure for the period ended 31 March will range from 15% to 20% higher than a year earlier, Naspers said in a statement on Wednesday. The company considers this the best measure of its operating performance.
Naspers, which rode an early investment in Tencent to a market value now topping R950bn, reports full results around 24 June, for the first time in US dollars. Because of non-recurring and non-operational items that it didn’t specify, the company said earnings per share after items will drop by 20% to 25%, from US$3,11 in fiscal 2015.
“We expect to see a further improvement in reducing losses at OLX and a solid performance in South African pay TV,” analysts at Renaissance Capital said in a report after the trading statement was released, referring to OLX online classifieds listings.
They said this would be offset by investments in Letgo, a classifieds app, and Showmax, which offers online programming, as well as cyclical weakness in its sub-Saharan Africa pay-TV business.
Naspers traded 2,1% higher at R2 185,36 at the close in Johannesburg. The shares earlier rose as much as 2,7%.
Naspers’s market capitalisation has tracked the record gains of Chinese WeChat messaging app developer Tencent, in which it owns a 34% stake.
Shenzhen, China-based Tencent has been by far Naspers’s most successful investment as the company transformed itself from a South African newspaper publisher into a continent-wide multimedia provider and backer of emerging market Internet businesses. — (c) 2016 Bloomberg LP