Unlock the Editor’s Digest for free
Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.
South African internet group Naspers, the biggest single investor in Chinese group Tencent, has appointed the head of Brazil’s biggest food delivery app as chief executive.
Fabricio Bloisi will also take over in July as head of Prosus, Naspers’ international investment arm, which holds the group’s stake in the Chinese internet company and other internet assets including iFood, which Bloisi has led for a decade.
Ervin Tu, who served as interim chief executive after the departure of Bob van Dijk last year, will become group president and chief investment officer.
“Fabricio is an entrepreneur with a proven track record. His appointment as CEO places innovation and entrepreneurship at the heart of the group,” said Koos Bekker, chair of Naspers and Prosus, on Friday.
Bloisi is set to continue buying back Prosus and Naspers shares, funded by steady selldowns of Tencent stock, as part of an attempt to close a big valuation gap in the group’s share price relative to its assets.
Prosus’s assets are worth about $135bn-$150bn, including $18bn-$24bn of unlisted assets, according to various analyst estimates, but its market value is about a third less.
The group’s stake in Tencent fell below 25 per cent at the end of last year, down from 29 per cent when it began the gradual sales in 2022. Investors disliked previous efforts to tackle the discount, such as a cross-shareholding structure between Prosus and Naspers that ended in 2021.
The buybacks by Prosus have averaged more than $150mn a week since they were launched in 2022, according to JPMorgan estimates.
The group is also seeking to spotlight returns on its investments beyond Tencent, which span payments, online classifieds, and other businesses. Prosus is targeting profitability across ecommerce assets this year, after iFood became profitable last year.
Prosus has also joined other investors in seeking a turnaround at Byju’s, the fallen Indian edtech group that was once the country’s most highly valued start-up.
Prosus owns Stack Overflow, the US software developer community platform, which this month announced an API partnership deal with OpenAI.
“A company like Prosus must play an important role in identifying new technologies, such as AI, that impact the world and specifically emerging markets,” Bloisi said.
Bloisi, founder of Movile, the Brazilian investment group, steered iFood to a so-called unicorn or $1bn-plus valuation and dominance of online food delivery in Brazil as chair from 2015, and then chief executive after 2019.
Prosus first backed iFood through Movile in 2013. In 2022 it also bought out a one-third stake held by Just Eat in the company for about €1.5bn.
Read the full article here