By Dave Sebastian
Bob van Dijk has stepped down as chief executive and board member of Naspers and its Prosus unit, after running the South African internet and media conglomerate for more than nine years.
Naspers didn't give a reason for the change, which it said was mutually agreed to and effective Monday. It appointed Ervin Tu, the group's chief investment officer, as interim CEO, and said van Dijk would help with the leadership transition and remain as a consultant until the end of September 2024.
The management change comes at a time when the 108-year-old company is pushing to make its businesses and investments profitable.
Naspers is best known for its highly successful investment in Chinese technology giant Tencent Holdings. The company, which started as a newspaper publisher, paid $34 million for a one-third stake in Tencent in 2001, before the company's WeChat messaging app took off in China.
A massive rise in Tencent's stock price made Naspers the most valuable company in Africa. Naspers listed Prosus, the unit that holds its Tencent shares, in Amsterdam in 2019, with van Dijk also at its helm.
Over the last few years, changes in China's regulatory environment have posed challenges to Tencent and its peers. Beijing in late 2020 embarked on a broad regulatory crackdown that hit internet companies, causing a rout in Chinese stocks that later was exacerbated by the country's stringent approach to Covid-19 and the weak economic recovery that followed it.
Prosus in June 2022 said it would offload some of its Tencent shares to fund buybacks of its and Naspers' shares, as part of an effort to bridge a valuation gap between Prosus and the value of its Tencent stake.
Prosus's Tencent shares are currently worth around $99 billion. The company reduced its stake in Tencent to 26% for the year ended March from 29% previously after those buybacks, Naspers said in June. It expects its stake to shrink 2 to 3 percentage points a year while the buyback continues, ending this year at around a quarter of the Chinese company.
Tencent shares have fallen more than 50% from their peak in early 2021, when the company's market capitalization topped $900 billion.
Van Dijk told The Wall Street Journal recently that Prosus intends to remain a long-term shareholder in Tencent, and that he was confident about Tencent's business and China's consumer industry.
Van Dijk, a Dutch national, joined Naspers in August 2013 as the CEO of its Poland-based online marketplace Allegro, which the company later sold, and became Naspers' CEO of global transaction commerce a couple months later. Before that, he worked at the e-commerce company eBay and media and online-marketplace company Schibsted.
Tu, the interim CEO, joined Naspers in 2021 from SoftBank Vision Fund, where he was managing partner. At SoftBank, Tu helped oversee investments in ride-hailing company Uber Technologies and TikTok parent ByteDance.
--Alexandra Wexler contributed to this article.
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
September 18, 2023 04:21 ET (08:21 GMT)
Copyright (c) 2023 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
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