In 2001, Naspers made the investment that would change its history. The South African media group paid around $32 million for a 46.5% stake in Tencent, then a relatively small Chinese internet company best known for its QQ messaging service.
It is easy, with hindsight, to view the deal as an obvious masterstroke. It was anything but. China’s internet economy was still in its infancy, the dot-com bubble had just burst and Tencent was a young company trying to find a sustainable business model.
Naspers stayed with it. Tencent went on to build one of the largest technology businesses in the world, expanding from messaging into gaming, social media, advertising, payments, fintech and cloud services. WeChat, launched a decade after the Naspers investment, would eventually become an indispensable part of everyday digital life in China.
The investment turned Naspers from a largely South African media business into a global technology investor with tens of billions of dollars at its disposal. Even today, after years of selling down the holding, Tencent remains central to the story. At the end of March 2026, Prosus, Naspers’ international investment arm, still owned 22.66% of the Chinese group.
Yet focusing too heavily on Tencent risks missing what Naspers has been trying to do with the wealth it created. The more interesting question today is whether the company can turn one exceptional investment into a repeatable investment model.
A company accustomed to reinvention
Naspers was founded in Cape Town in 1915 and spent much of its first decades in newspapers and publishing. It later moved into pay television through M-Net and MultiChoice, before the arrival of the internet pushed the group towards another transformation.
By the late 1990s and early 2000s, Naspers was increasingly looking outside South Africa.What distinguished its approach was geography. Instead of concentrating on Silicon Valley or established Western technology markets, it looked at countries where large populations were coming online quickly and where local technology companies had room to build dominant positions.
China was one. India became another.
Naspers backed Indian ecommerce company Flipkart and eventually sold its 11.18% holding to Walmart in 2018 for $2.2 billion. The group said the exit produced an absolute return of around $1.6 billion—roughly 3.6 times the capital invested over six years.
It was an important deal for another reason. It showed that Naspers could make money from technology investments beyond Tencent.More investments followed, particularly in online classifieds, food delivery, ecommerce and payments.
Then Tencent became a problem of its own
Tencent’s spectacular rise created an unusual difficulty for Naspers. Its stake became so valuable that it dwarfed much of the rest of the company. Investors frequently valued Naspers at a sizeable discount to the value of the assets it owned.
In 2019, the group responded by listing Prosus in Amsterdam and placing most of its international internet investments under the new company. The structure gave global investors more direct access to a portfolio that by then stretched across China, India, Latin America and Europe.
It did not completely solve the valuation problem.
In 2022, Naspers and Prosus launched an open-ended share buyback programme, partly financed through gradual sales of Tencent shares. By June 2026, the group said approximately $46 billion had been returned through buybacks.
It is an unusual strategy, but the reasoning is fairly simple: when your own shares trade well below the value of the assets behind them, buying them can be more attractive than buying another company.
What came after Tencent?
The answer is increasingly visible in Naspers’ current portfolio.
Food delivery has become one of its biggest areas of investment. In Brazil, iFood has developed into far more than a delivery app. The company is expanding into payments, financial services and technology for restaurants.
The numbers are substantial. In the year to March 2026, iFood generated $400 million in adjusted EBITDA, an increase of 56%. Its fintech operation, iFood Pago, produced $463 million in revenue.
Online classifieds have also become a sizeable business. OLX reported revenue of $992 million and adjusted EBITDA of $481 million in FY2026, giving it a margin of around 48%.
India remains one of the group’s most important markets.
Over the years, Prosus has invested in businesses including Swiggy, Meesho, Rapido and ixigo, while building PayU into a major payments operation. PayU processed around $90 billion in payments during FY2026 and generated $781 million in revenue.
Latin America is becoming an interesting test of where Naspers wants to go next.
Prosus acquired travel platform Despegar, adding it to an ecosystem already centred around iFood. Despegar recorded $5.9 billion in gross bookings during FY2026. The connection between the two businesses is already beginning to show. According to Naspers, 21% of Despegar’s Brazilian B2C net revenue came from iFood customers.
That figure says quite a lot about the new strategy.
Prosus no longer wants to be simply a shareholder in a collection of internet companies. It wants those businesses to share customers, technology, payments, data and increasingly artificial intelligence.
The Bloisi era
That shift has accelerated since Fabricio Bloisi became chief executive of Naspers and Prosus in 2024. Bloisi is not a conventional investment executive. He built Movile and helped turn iFood into one of Latin America’s largest digital platforms. His appointment signalled that Prosus wanted to become more involved in operating businesses rather than simply allocating capital to them.
The group is now concentrating on three broad regional ecosystems: Latin America, Europe and India.Europe has become particularly important following the acquisition of Just Eat Takeaway.com, alongside OLX and other operations.
Artificial intelligence runs through much of the new strategy. Prosus is using AI in areas ranging from customer service and recommendations to fraud detection, logistics, payments and tools for merchants.
Whether that produces another major source of value remains to be seen. But financially, the operating portfolio is becoming harder to ignore.
In FY2026, ecosystem revenue reached $9.7 billion, while adjusted EBITDA climbed to $1.3 billion. Free cash flow reached a record $1.5 billion.
More significantly, all three of the group’s regional ecosystems were profitable. For years, the criticism of Naspers was that Tencent generated the value while many of its other internet investments consumed cash. The latest numbers suggest that distinction is becoming less clear.
An African company with an unusually global investment map
There is something unusual about the geography of Naspers.One of the world’s largest technology investment groups was created in Africa, yet many of the investments that defined it were made elsewhere.
Tencent was Chinese. Flipkart and Swiggy are Indian. iFood is Brazilian. Prosus is listed in Amsterdam. South Africa, however, remains part of the portfolio. Takealot, the group’s ecommerce platform, generated roughly $1 billion in revenue in FY2026 and reached full-year adjusted EBIT profitability for the first time.
For Africa’s technology and investment industry, Naspers therefore represents an interesting case. Its lesson is not that every investor should search for “the next Tencent”. Deals such as Tencent are exceptionally rare, and Naspers itself has had plenty of investments that did not produce comparable results. Businesses have been sold, closed or written down along the way.
The more relevant lesson may be the willingness to look beyond familiar markets and to stay invested when a business has the potential to become much larger than originally imagined.
A South African company identified Tencent before most international investors understood what China’s internet economy could become. It later applied the same appetite for emerging markets to India, Brazil and elsewhere.
Twenty-five years after the Tencent investment, however, Naspers faces a different test. It has already proved that it can spot an extraordinary company early. Now it has to prove that the organisation built around that success can create value repeatedly.
That is why the next few years may tell us more about Naspers as an investor than the famous $32 million cheque it wrote in 2001.