Tencent and NetEase shed more than $60-billion of value on Thursday as investor fears grow that Chinese regulators are preparing to tighten their grip dramatically on the world’s largest gaming industry.
Browsing: Prosus
Tencent investor Prosus – the spinoff of JSE-listed technology and media conglomerate Naspers – is placing its bet on India as the next big technology market.
Technology investor Prosus said on Tuesday it had agreed to buy Indian payments platform BillDesk for $4.7-billion to complement its own PayU business.
China will forbid minors from gaming more than three hours most weeks of the year, imposing their strictest controls yet in a blow to the world’s largest mobile gaming arena.
Naspers’s high-voting A shares once again ensured that all of the resolutions at Wednesday’s AGM were passed, despite hefty opposition from the N shareholders.
Chinese technology shares rallied in Hong Kong on Monday as bargain hunters pounced in the wake of the sector’s worst rout in months.
The deal between South Africa’s Naspers and its spinoff Prosus this week caused havoc, with the JSE forced to delay opening by hours on Wednesday amid the rush of rebalancing trades.
The five-and-a-half-hour outage on the JSE that prevented traders buying and selling stocks until well into the afternoon on Wednesday was not a good signal for a bourse that touts itself as Africa’s finest.
Shares in both Naspers and its European spinoff Prosus tumbled on Tuesday, following Tencent’s sharp fall after a Chinese state media article described online videogames as “spiritual opium”.
Technology investor Prosus will pay up to the equivalent of R2.1-billion in transaction fees when it buys a block of parent company Naspers’s shares, prompting criticism from investors.