Naspers Limited

The problem is even worse if you look at other country-- a-at, at other geographies.

In, um, Africa, for instance, if you look at what the most valuable company in Africa is, it's a company called Naspers, which I'm sure is a company that you've never heard about.

And there's a very good reason for that, which is, you know, the question, you know, what does Naspers do? And the answer to that is not very much.

Naspers, which right now is worth about forty billion dollars, owns, owes its entire value to the fact that it made a bet on Tencent twenty-five years ago.

Now, on the one hand, you know, that's a very good reflection of Naspers' deal-making acumen, even though it's been losing that money on diversification over twenty-five years.

But what does it say about Africa that the most valuable company on that continent is not a company that is monetizing Africa's technological potential, making products to sell abroad, but a company that essentially owns a minority stake in Tencent? And you could make the same argument about Latin America.

You could make the same argument about the Far East.

Well, if you look at the JSE and you look at the shares that are traded, and if you listen to my business bulletins and you look at the shares that I refer to, uh, you'll notice that you hear the same names again and again.

You'll hear the miners, you'll hear your Naspers, you will hear your Richmond, you'll hear all of these companies, your Capitechs and your Shoprites and your Pick n Pays and your First Rands and even the Foschini Group.

But, um, that is just a tiny percentage of the shares on the JSE, and we have what I suppose you could refer to as a concentrated stock exchange.

Now, how did we get here? What are the implications of you for this? And if you listen to Personal Finance every Tuesday, if you didn't, there's a podcast, you'll remember that Warren Ingram will tell you to diversify all the time.

... uh, that we, we, we talk about.

So the gold companies, um, which, you know, just given the, the movement of gold and the, the impact of geopolitics in the world that resulted in gold moving in this way, have become a big part of the market.

Naspers, um, you know, it's, it's become a, a massive company.

In fact, it's presented the JSE with some challenges, um, you know, o-over the years.

They don't exist in the top 40.

You know, we have to choose between Naspers and British American Tobacco and Sasol and this, that, and the other.

I mean, it's hard to outperform that.

You can't outperform the index there, but you can do very well in the small and mid-cap space.

Um, again, if you look at the price volatility, the risk of the gold price going up and down, the volatility, the price volatility of gold is quite limited.

It's not huge.

If you look at the price volatility of something like Naspers or Sasol or, uh, those type of stocks, it's much higher.

But you can have huge exposure to a single stock in a portfolio, but not gold.

Almost every year since 2000, it's given you at least 5% positive, except for four years.

There are many equities, NASPERS included, that can't necessarily give you that.

There are some equities that just don't even exist, that people have put a lot more of their portfolio in than they're willing to put into the pet rock.

So how much gold does the All Mutual Investors Fund earn? To give me a sense of where you think a general allocation should be towards gold.

And I think those three factors are essentially what's confusing the market.

But today, a bit of clarity, a bit of risk of sentiment, starting in Asia Pacific, where we saw a tech sell-off, which flowed into our markets, where we saw a bit of pain from the industrials, which included NASPERS.

Yeah, let's take a look at some good news because it seems as though that's what we're in need of on this Wednesday morning or Wednesday evening rather.

The RAND, 16 RAND 5 cents against the US dollar, flirting with that 16 RAND level.

Yeah

... during that time helped the company that Naspers, uh, that he was running.

Yeah.

In your case, where did you go? What did you, who did you talk to? What did you learn?

Nobody has named a price.

So Prosus and Naspers have this argument with their shareholders every year.

And this year, the shareholders put it in writing first.

So a couple of the key shareholders have disclosed votes against directors ahead of Wednesday's meeting.

I mean, a recent purchase is Tencent, actually.

And Tencent's really interesting because there's a South African company called Naspers-

Yes

... which owned 30-something percent of Tencent way back when.