South Africa, where 80% of the adult population owns a cellphone but the median income is a mere R3 000/month, poses specific challenges to tech companies trying to make inroads into the cellphone market. For many, the solution has come in the form of apps that allow
Browsing: Naspers
A month ago, Bloomberg proclaimed the chairman of Tencent, Ma Huateng, to be China’s richest man, with a wealth of US$13bn based on Tencent’s Hong Kong-listed shares, of which he owns 10%. His family name Ma means horse, so the Internet
Nineteen billion dollars. Two hundred and ten billion rand. Nearly R500/user. That’s how much Facebook has agreed to pony up for WhatsApp, the fast-growing but still very much loss-making cross-platform mobile instant messaging platform. It’s a daring – perhaps insane – bet by Facebook’s
It’s the end of an era. Naspers has announced that its long-serving CEO, Koos Bekker, 61, is stepping down as CEO. Bekker, who will stand down from the Naspers board for a year, will be succeeded by the media and technology group’s head of e-commerce
Facebook is stumping up US$19bn in cash and shares to buy popular instant messaging platform WhatsApp, which has 450m active monthly users and which is adding a million new users a month. The deal could have been driven, at least in part, by a “potentially massive threat from the
Naspers’s share price has added nearly a third in the past three months and has more than doubled in the past year as investor excitement in its Chinese affiliate, fast-growing communications and e-commerce firm Tencent, reaches fever pitch
This week’s blistering attack on Google by 24.com, the Cape Town-based digital publishing arm of JSE-listed media and technology giant Naspers, in which it accused the US company of dodging taxes in South Africa, is just the latest such attack by a Naspers company. In 2011, Brazilian
A unit of media giant Naspers has launched an extraordinary and blistering attack on Google, accusing the US Internet giant of not paying its fair share of taxes in South Africa. It says Google is making it hard for local digital publishers to compete because it transacts through an offshore entity
StarSat, the pay-television platform previously known as TopTV, will emerge as a “serious competitor” to MultiChoice, the Naspers subsidiary that owns the dominant DStv service. That’s the word from Peter van den Steen, who is overseeing the business rescue of StarSat parent On
Stellenbosch-based mobile messaging platform and social network Mxit is taking aim at the vast Indian market, launching the service in the south Asian powerhouse this week in the hope of dramatically expanding its reach. The South African team