As I step into a rather ordinary looking building in the drab Johannesburg suburb of Rivonia, I get the sense there is a buzz in the air, even though there’s no one about as I walk past an unmanned reception desk. Stuck on the desk is a handwritten note instructing interns to head upstairs. That’s where Gareth Cliff, until recently the host
Browsing: WeChat
Shares in South African-headquartered media, communications and e-commerce giant Naspers leapt higher on Wednesday on the back of strong results from China’s Tencent, in which it holds an approximate one-third stake. Naspers was trading up by more than 8,5%
Shares in JSE-listed technology and media group Naspers took a battering on Friday as investors turned sour on Tencent, the fast-growing Chinese communications and e-commerce company that owns chat programs WeChat and QQ. Reuters reported that Naspers’s shares were off by their biggest one-day
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
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
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