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
Browsing: Tencent
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
Naspers is within a whisker of smashing through R1 000/share for the first time and reaching a market capitalisation of R400bn thanks to an 80%-plus surge in its share price in the past 12 months. The growth in its value in recent years has been nothing short of
The market capitalisation of Tencent has rocketed through US$100bn for the first time, helping lift the share price of South Africa’s Naspers, which holds a one-third stake in the fast-growing Chinese Internet company, nearer to the R1 000/share level. In trading in Hong Kong on Tuesday
DStv Online CEO John Kotsaftis, 41, is the quintessential geek. He tells me as much when I sit down to interview him in one of the boardrooms at DStv Online’s offices in Randburg, Johannesburg. His love of technology started with a friend’s gaming console. “He got an Atari
Naspers’s decision, 12 years ago, to buy a stake in Chinese instant-messaging, entertainment and online advertising company Tencent continues to pay big dividends for the South African-headquartered media and technology group. Financial results published on Tuesday