The astonishing things is that shareholders were asked to approve the new scheme – and did – without knowing what the performance condition was.
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.
The dominance of Naspers over the South African stock market is about to be reduced – partially at least. And that’s good news for a number of fund managers.
When Naspers’s Latin America chief cold-called Alec Oxenford in 2010, he got straight to the point: he wanted to buy a majority stake of the Argentinian entrepreneur’s online classifieds business.
Naspers Ventures is leading a US$2.3-million (R34-million) seed funding round in DappRadar, a platform for discovering and analysing blockchain-based decentralised applications, or dApps.
Three investment banks – Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan and Morgan Stanley – will be paid €7.2-million each for their roles as lead financial advisors in Naspers’s listing of Prosus in Amsterdam.
Naspers said a newly created entity containing assets including a stake in Chinese internet giant Tencent Holdings will be valued at about $100-billion (R1.5-trillion).
Not all shareholders are perfectly happy with Naspers at the moment, which made the group’s AGM on Friday a livelier affair than usual.
Naspers is looking to invest in machine learning as Africa’s largest company seeks to expand following an Amsterdam listing of assets including a stake in Tencent Holdings.
Naspers has received enough votes from shareholders to proceed with an Amsterdam listing of assets including a R1.9-trillion stake in Chinese Internet giant Tencent Holdings.