Naspers chief Bob van Dijk to step down

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Bob van Dijk is stepping down as president of Naspers, the South African web business and the single-biggest investor in China’s Tencent through its Prosus financial investment arm.

Van Dijk, who has actually supervised of Naspers given that 2014, will leave as head of the group efficient on September 18, the Johannesburg-listed business stated on Monday.

He will likewise leave as head of Prosus, the Amsterdam-listed financial investment lorry through which Naspers manages a variety of international web properties from Indian payments to Brazilian food shipment services.

Ervin Tu, primary financial investment officer of both business, will take control of as interim president of the 2 entities.

Van Dijk “has actually accepted help with the shift. and will stay as a specialist to the group up until 30 September 2024,” Naspers stated.

He leaves the leading post after a long period throughout which Naspers faced the rising worth of its Tencent stake, which eclipsed its other financial investments and eventually led it to outgrow its house stock exchange.

Van Dijk led the 2019 listing of Prosus to rehouse the Tencent stake in reaction and took other steps to deal with a huge space in between the worth of Naspers and its stake in Tencent. These consisted of buybacks moneyed by the steady selldown of shares in the Chinese business.

He managed both the production and relaxing of a cross-shareholding structure in between Prosus and its moms and dad, which was introduced to even more minimize Naspers’ weighting on the Johannesburg stock market. Financiers, nevertheless, criticised it as complex and complicated.

Tu signed up with Naspers in 2021 from SoftBank, where he was a handling partner at the Japanese corporation’s Vision Fund financial investment lorry.

As Naspers chief, Van Dijk prospered existing chair Koos Bekker, the media magnate who turned a publisher and pay-TV operator with a dark apartheid past into an international web financier with his 2001 bet on Tencent, then a little start-up.

Van Dijk managed global growth consisting of billions of dollars of financial investment by Naspers in services in India such as shipment app Swiggy and online knowing group Byju’s.

” Throughout this time, considerable services were developed in classifieds, food shipment and payments, while we likewise got in numerous brand-new fields,” Bekker stated.

Under van Dijk, Naspers likewise spun off MultiChoice, Africa’s most significant pay-TV business, and Prosus made a huge venture into the United States tech market in 2021 with the $1.8 bn acquisition of Stack Overflow, the software application designer Q&A website.

Naspers stays under financier pressure to discover more services to the space in between its share cost and properties, including its 26 percent stake in Tencent, which Naspers has actually stated remains of tactical worth.

Prosus has actually been looking for to increase returns and success in its other properties. It has actually likewise needed to handle the souring of its financial investment in Byju’s, where Prosus just recently stated that management “frequently ignored” its suggestions.

On Monday, Naspers and Prosus likewise finished the elimination of the cross-shareholding structure, which was set up in 2021.