Naspers said a newly created entity containing assets including a stake in Chinese internet giant Tencent will be valued at about $100 billion (Dh367.25bn). Africa’s largest company by market value received shareholder backing last week to proceed with the listing of Prosus in Amsterdam next month. Alongside the Tencent stake, the new company will hold businesses from Brazil to Germany in industries such as online food delivery and classified advertising. A value of $100bn would make only Royal Dutch Shell and consumer-goods giant Unilever bigger in Amsterdam by market capitalisation. The company would overtake ASML Holding, a semiconductor gear-maker priced at about €80bn (Dh326.61bn). Naspers opted to spin off Prosus - in which it will keep a 73 per cent stake - to ease its dominance of Johannesburg’s stock exchange and help reduce a valuation gap between the Cape Town-based company and its stake in Tencent. The new group’s assets were valued at about $34bn as of end June, Naspers said on Monday. Naspers shares erased gains after the publication of the anticipated market value of Prosus, and traded 0.1 per cent higher at 3,421.11 rand as of 11:52am in Johannesburg. The stock could gain by a further 40 per cent to 4,800 rand, JP Morgan analysts led by JP Davids said in a note published Monday. “In addition to Tencent’s outperformance, we expect the recent compression in the holding company’s discount to be sustained as it reduces its South African sovereign exposure.” Prosus had net income of about $1.4bn for the three months through June, compared with $1.1bn the previous year, Naspers said. JP Morgan, Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley are the main financial advisers on the Prosus listing. Naspers is looking to invest in machine learning as it seeks to expand, the firm said last week. The South Africa internet and technology group spent about $3bn on its various ventures around the world last year, including Indian food-delivery service Swiggy and Russian classifieds site Avito. Machine learning - a subset of artificial intelligence - is another area of interest, as is online education, executives said at the weekend. “We are interested in investing in machine learning,” chief executive Bob van Dijk told shareholders at the annual general meeting in Cape Town. “The amount of data is exploding - last year we collected more data in the world than ever before.” Naspers backed Tencent as a start-up 18 years ago. The growth of that company has helped transform Naspers from its roots as a publisher of South African newspapers, which now makes up about 0.5 per cent of the business.
