Investors piled into Naspers’s newly listed Dutch unit, holding assets including a lucrative stake in Tencent Holdings, sending its shares soaring on their trading debut in Amsterdam.
Prosus, as the new company is known, jumped 29% above its reference price as of 8.04am to value the group at around €123-billion (R2-trillion). Naspers is retaining a 73% stake.
Naspers CEO Bob van Dijk planned the move to ease the company’s dominance of Johannesburg’s stock exchange and attract more international investors to what’s become a global group.
The Cape Town-based company has long been valued at less than its US$128-billion Tencent stake, and a key reason for the Prosus spin-off is to narrow that gap. — Reported by John Bowker, (c) 2019 Bloomberg LP
