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
Browsing: Tencent
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
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
There’s an online land grab of the sort not seen since the dot-com bubble taking place in the global instant messaging (IM) market. WhatsApp Messenger, WeChat (partly owned by South Africa’s Naspers), Hangouts, Skype and BlackBerry Messenger, along with several smaller
Internet and media giant Naspers has smashed the R1 000/share barrier in early morning trade on Friday, propelled higher by weakness in the rand – the currency has tumbled to four-year lows this week – and insatiable investor interest in China’s Tencent, in which it owns a one-third stake
MWeb plans to tackle the incumbents in the public Wi-Fi hotspot market in South Africa with an aggressively priced offering of its own. The Internet service provider, which is owned by media group Naspers, plans to launch the product this weekend at Canal Walk, a large shopping mall near Cape
A focus on developing classifieds websites and building digital terrestrial television networks in Africa will lead to a big increase in development spending by Naspers in the second half of its current financial year, the media and Internet group said on Tuesday
It emerged this week, in an article in the Wall Street Journal, that Snapchat, a Californian start-up that develops a smartphone app of the same name popular among teens, recently spurned a US$3bn-plus all-cash offer from Facebook to buy it out. The offer value was at least three times the already
BlackBerry appears to have scored a hit among Android and iPhone users with its BlackBerry Messenger (BBM) application. According to the company, the long-delayed app has been downloaded more than 10m times in just 24 hours after release on the two platforms