BUSINESS MAVERICK: Naspers approaches its existential crisis

For such a huge company, Naspers has a peculiar problem similar to someone who just arrived at a new school from out to town. Who are they? Are they important? Who are their friends going to be? Should we just ignore them? Could they make the first team?

Well, all this is about to change, and arguably that process began on Friday with the company’s annual results. The results were pretty good, verging on excellent. Revenue was up 29% to $19-billion, something Naspers calls “core headline earnings” grew 26% to $3-billion. This is not astronomical, but none of the above-mentioned companies is anything close to that, so shareholders should be relieved.

Naspers is an odd mix of the two. Look at Naspers’ investments: they consist of an extraordinary array of brands and geographic locations. Just keeping track of all of this stuff is bewildering. After years of avoiding direct confrontations with their big competitors, now it is becoming more inevitable. And consequently, the company probably needs more recognition, more focus and probably a more active management. It urgently needs to move out of the shadow of Tencent. Interestingly, the Naspers investor pack includes a graph which purports to show the company is now growing faster than its Chinese partner.

In a different way, the same sort of thing applies to Naspers’s food delivery businesses. They, too, are all over the place, and the company is pouring money into them. Van Dijk himself is dead keen on this business, saying “we are seeing five times more opportunity” than a few years ago.

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