Kevin Nyango
Naspers is a Johannesburg company in South Africa and it is one of the most valued companies in Africa and one of the world’s most valuable companies at the same time. The company which deals with both media and internet services announced its half annual revenue collections on 29th November 2017. The company’s performance was hiked by its 33.3% investments in Chinese internet company Tencent Holdings Ltd. The Chinese company boosted its stakes up by 0.8% making its overall gain in the whole year to 84%.
Naspers Company was established in 1915 as a newspaper publisher and is now listed as the 65th largest company in the world amongst Stoxx Global 3000 index. According to Wall Street Journals, in 2016 the company was far away to the reach of top 100. The rise has been influenced by Tencent’s self-flying share price.
Naspers invested $34 million in the Tencent in 2001, and now the Chinese company is worth roughly $170 billion. Most of the investors are banking on Naspers share discounts which are expected to go up in case it sells out. The company’s market cap came to an end at around $121 billion. The company has invested in various companies apart from Tencent which includes; Mail.ru Group, a Russian internet company that runs two of the country’s three biggest social networks, Delivery Hero, a food-delivery company based in Germany, and Flipkart, India’s biggest e-commerce site.
The company’s net profit for a half a year which ended on 30th September 2017 went high by 98% to $1.1 billion, while revenue went high by 5% to $3.1 billion. Tencent holdings and the company’s global digital classified businesses which happened to make a profit for the first time are what boosted the income of Naspers Ltd.
Tencent has helped Naspers to gain silent ownership in other several companies. In January 2017 Tencent acquired a 5% stake in Tesla Inc. and a 12% stake in Snap Inc. and many more.
Naspers managed to open a venture-capital outfit in Silicon Valley to make it closer to the tech-innovation hub. The company has been in completion with some of the renowned business rivals. The company launched ShowMaxx a streaming service across Africa; the company is also going head to head with Craigslist Inc. in the United States with a mobile app known as LetGo.
Naspers was started as the National Press Ltd., to produce a newspaper in Dutch Language for Dutch who was residing in South Africa. The company, later on, played a pivotal part in stopping the famous apartheid rule and helped the National party to ascend to power in 1948.
