Ivan Fallon: Rupert Murdoch was once the future – but not any more

Rupert Murdoch, the media mogul at the helm of News Corp, is finding himself overshadowed by industry newcomers such as Facebook, Alphabet, Netflix, HBO and even the little-known Naspers.

CAPE TOWN // Rupert Murdoch’s £11.7 billion (Dh53.16bn) bid for the 61 per cent of Sky he does not already own has predictably reopened old wounds and revived historic hostilities. But it has also ignited an interesting debate on where the traditional media world is going.

Many newspapers, we know, are in decline, but consumers are also spending less time watching TV, increasingly choosing to stream video on their phones and tablets.

Six years ago, when Mr Murdoch's News Corp unsuccessfully tried to take over Sky, one of the concerns that arose was the dominant share of news production the merged company would hold. Since then the Murdoch group's share of the market has halved, partly because of dwindling newspaper circulation and the end of News of the World.

But Sky is struggling too, suffering from viewers switching in large numbers to online information. Between last year and this year the numbers of customers dropping their subscriptions increased in each of its markets – Britain, Ireland, Italy, Germany and Austria.

Competition from BT, which used to be a phone company only, has forced it to pay more for the rights to broadcast sport in Britain. And fewer people are watching its big football matches.

Mr Murdoch’s master company 21st Century Fox, – he split the empire in two after his first abortive Sky bid – is still a monster, with US$40 billion in annual revenue and a market value of $55bn.

But actually it is one of the smaller media companies, dwarfed by the rise of the new generation of companies that have neither TV nor newspapers.

Google (or Alphabet as it is known on the stock markets) is 10 times its size, and Facebook, with a market value of $330bn, is six times larger. Those two companies between them account for 60 per cent of all digital ad revenues.

And the Murdochs are being challenged from all sides – the rise of Net-flix, HBO and other streaming services threatens the revenue streams of its cable channels and even its film studios.

The Sky bid was viewed as an aggressive move in 2010; but this time around it is defensive.

Just how quickly the media world is changing is illustrated by the rise and rise of an unknown South African -media company that has quietly eclipsed the Murdoch empire, at least in market value.

At the end of the 1980s Naspers was basically a publisher of Afrikaans-language newspapers, which had traditionally supported the old Apartheid regime.

Several directors and former editors ended up in high offices, including presidents Malan, Verwoerd and P W Botha, and it didn’t seem to have much going for it under a future black government.

Then it appointed a very clever young chief executive, Koos Bekker, who created the MNet pay TV company, which became Africa’s biggest, and invested heavily in the internet.

Its big success by far has been its investment in Tencent, a Chinese internet phenomenon. Only started in 1998, today Tencent is listed in Hong Kong with a market value of $230bn – and Naspers owns 34 per cent of it.

Naspers’ share price has risen by 500 per cent since 2010 and its market value stands at $66bn, well ahead of the great Murdoch empire that has taken Rupert 60 years to build. The company’s Tencent holding, for which it paid $40bn, is now worth $78bn, which means that its interests in TV, newspapers, magazines, Polish websites, which it just sold for $3.2bn, and all the rest of its portfolio are valued at -minus $12bn by the stock markets.

Tencent’s social platforms have become part of the fabric of Chinese lives, described by one banker as “a social enterprise powerhouse”, China’s answer to Facebook, WhatsApp, Spotify, Kindle and ApplePay all under one roof.

The internet analyst at HSBC, Chi Tsang, says that Tencent has “the most killer apps in the world”. Weixin, its “wildly popular” messaging app, and its WeChat payment app have 846 million monthly subscribers between them.

Pony Ma Huateng, its 45-year-old chairman and founder, is now ranked as the world's 46th richest man by Forbes, with a net worth of $21.9bn.

As for Koos Bekker, for years he took his salary in Naspers shares and last year he sold 11.7 million of them for $2.2bn. He has moved from full-time chief executive to non-executive chairman of Naspers, bought himself a large house and estate in Somerset, built a beautiful garden and vineyard near Stellenbosch and flies out to Hong Kong for board meetings of Tencent.

Thirty years ago, when he started Sky, Rupert was the future. Today it’s Pony Ma. But 10 years from now? Who knows.

Ivan Fallon is a former business editor of The Sunday Times.

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