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.
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.
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 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.
Naspers has corrected a problem that forced Africa’s biggest company to delay a planned listing of Internet assets in Amsterdam, sending mail to the right addresses to reach shareholders.
Naspers has appointed Phuthi Mahanyele-Dabengwa as CEO of its South Africa business. It’s a newly created executive position, and Mahanyele-Dabengwa will report directly to CEO Bob van Dijk.
TechCentral editor Duncan McLeod spoke to Naspers CEO Bob van Dijk about the group’s acquisition, through Naspers Foundry, of a stake in SweepSouth, the controversy over the group’s dual shareholding structure, and more.